Type Erasure Techniques in C
Type erasure refers to the process of hiding type information about a class, enabling the manipulation of objects without exposing their underlying types. This article explores various type erasure techniques and their functionality.
Common Techniques:
1. Virtual Functions:
Virtual functions encapsulate behavior in an interface-based hierarchy. Implementing classes hide their implementation details, allowing the invocation of virtual functions polymorphically.
2. Function Pointers:
Function pointers can represent templated functions. Objects are held in void* pointers to hide their types. This technique is used in Boost.Function libraries.
3. shared_ptr
shared_ptr
4. "GMan" Technique:
This technique uses intermediate delegates and exploits a double template instantiation to effectively hide the actual type behind a movable delegate, allowing for type-safe operations and method invocation.
Use Cases:
- Object pooling
- Polymorphic factories
- Runtime polymorphism without inheritance
- Hiding implementation details for improved flexibility and maintainability
Example Code:
The provided example code demonstrates the Any_Virtual and Any_VoidPtr type erasure techniques in action. It allows the storage and manipulation of objects with different types while hiding their actual types behind virtual functions or void* pointers and function pointers.
Further Reading:
- [Boost.Any Reference](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/libs/any/doc/html/index.html)
- [Function Pointers in C ](https://www.learncpp.com/cpp-tutorial/function-pointers-in-cpp/)
- [GMan's Delegate-Based Technique](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/56752/generic-function-with-hidden-type-information-in-c)
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