this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
122 points (94.2% liked)

Programmer Humor

19331 readers
20 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Source

Alt text:A screenshot from the linked article titled "Reflection in C++26", showing reflection as one of the bullet points listed in the "Core Language" section

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

I can see the footguns, but I can also see the huge QoL improvement - no more std::enable_if spam to check if a class type has a member, if you can just check for them.

... at least I hope it would be less ugly than std::enable_if.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

You already can do that with C++20 concepts and the requires expression

template <typename T>
concept has_member_foo = requires(T t) {
    t.foo();
};

// Will fail to instantiate (with nice error 
// message) if t.foo() is ill-formed
template <has_member_foo T>
void bar(T t) {
    // ...
}

// abbreviated form of above
void baz(has_member_foo auto t) {
    // ...
}

// verbose form of above
template <typename T> requires
    has_member_foo<T>
void biz(T t) {
    // ...
}

// same as above but with anonymous concept
template <typename T> requires
    requires(T t) { t.foo(); }
void bom(T t) {
    // ...
}

// If already inside a function
if constexpr (has_member_foo<T>) {
    // ...
}

// Same but with anonymous concept
if constexpr (requires(T t) { t.foo(); }) {
    // ...
}
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I imagine reflections would make the process more straightforward, requires expressions are powerful but either somewhat verbose or possibly incomplete.

For instance, in your example foo could have any of the following declarations in a class:

  • void foo();
  • int foo() const;
  • template <typename T> foo(T = { }) &&;
  • decltype([]() { }) foo;
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure if there's anything enable_if can do that concepts can't do somewhat better but yeah there's definitely a lot of subtleties that reflection is going to make nicer or possible in the first place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, std::enable_if is straight up worse, they're unreadable and don't work when two function overloads (idk about variables) have the same signature.

I'm not even sure enable_if can do something that constraints can't at all...

load more comments (5 replies)