One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language featu...

Setting the Stage Previously, I tried to answer the question: what’s so hard about constexpr allocation?. Today, we continue what will become a series of posts about attempting to explain the issues behind a bunch of hard problems we’re trying to solve. The next problem: class types as non-type ...

Setting the Stage Before C++20, we couldn’t have any allocation during constant evaluation at all. Any attempt to do so would fail the evaluation — it would no longer be constant. In C++20, as a result of P0784R7, that changed. Finally we could do allocation during constant evaluation. However,...

Let’s say we’re writing one container that we’re implementing in terms of another container. If we want to make my container a range based entirely on that other container, that’s easy: template <typename T> class StableVector { std::vector<T*> impl; public: auto begin() con...

The Associative Container API When it comes to a hash table, there are basically only two interesting operations from an API perspective: lookup and insertion 1. The standard library containers are all very consistent in how these operations are provided, across all the associative containers (m...

Introduction Nico Josuttis gave a talk recently that included an example like this: std::vector<int> coll{1, 4, 7, 10}; auto isEven = [](int i) { return i % 2 == 0; }; // increment even elements: for (int& i : coll | std::views::filter(isEven)) { ++i; // UB: but works } I want...

With the adoption of Ranges in C++20 (and with a lot of new additions in C++23), we have a lot of new, composable, range-based algorithms at our disposal. There are, however, several ways to spell the usage of such algorithms: std::vector<int> v = {1, 2, 3}; auto square = [](int i){ return...

Several years ago, I wrote a post about the complexities of implementing comparison operators for optional<T>: Getting in trouble with mixed comparisons. That post was all about how, even just for ==, making a few seemingly straightforward decisions leads to an ambiguity that different libr...

In Rust, if I want to print some 32-bit unsigned value in hex, with the leading 0x, padded out with zeros, I would write that as: println!("{:#010x}", value); In C++23, if I want to do the same, that’s: std::println("{:#010x}", value); The only difference is the spelling of the name of the ...

Sometimes, we want more than to just iterate over all the elements of a range. We also want the index of each element. If we had something like a vector<T>, then a simple for loop suffices 1: for (int i = 0; i < vec.size(); ++i) { // use i or vec[i] } But for a range that can’t be...