CppCon 2017: Louis Dionne “Runtime Polymorphism: Back to the Basics”

[@TobiasFuchs]

link to the related talk mentioned at 5:59 "Better Code: Runtime Polymorphism - Sean Parent" kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3jGh4uderuAgMk

[@oktal3700]

Links from penultimate slide: Zach Laine "Pragmatic Type Erasure" kzbin.info/www/bejne/ZnqTd3dpg5qWna8 Boost.TypeErasure boost.org/doc/libs/release/doc/html/boost_typeerasure.html Adobe Poly stlab.adobe.com/group__poly__related.html Eraserface github.com/badair/eraserface Liberasure github.com/atomgalaxy/liberasure 2004 thread on interfaces goo.gl/zaBN6X

[@vittorioromeo1]

Brilliant talk. With proper reflection `dyno` could become the first choice for runtime polymorphism, leaving `virtual` in the dust.

[@YourCRTube]

Often a classical hierarchy is needed - the child need to know about its parent and use its functionality, improve upon it. Here only the case of an 'interface' is tackled, not a complete inheritance (as in not-by-interface-alone).

[@randfur]

@@YourCRTube I don't think using dyno means you can't use inheritance to share code and fields as per normal. It just changes the dispatch methodology to not depend so heavily on the heap in the common case.

[@skyeplus]

1:03:59 The objection to inlining virtual calls doesn't make sense to me. It only happens when the type of the object is known, at least on paper.

[@von_nobody]

20:33 there is tweak to this, you could always send buffer address to vtable and have special version of vtable that thande this buffer as pointer. All checks will be constexpr in that vtable

[@kensmith5694]

The need to allocate on the heap only happens if you don't know what objects will be needed at compile time. If you know what objects are needed, they can be made before main or actually in the executable. It is still polymorphic if you pass to a routine a pointer to one of the existing object. If you don't know how many integers or complex objects you are going to need, somebody has to do the heap action. K&R made an error when they made the null pointer all zeros. Practically all real hardware or virtual memory spaces have a location at address zero. Thus there is a real location that matches up with the null.

[@KhalilEstell]

Thank you. I found it so weird that he kept saying that inheritance results in heap allocation.

[@viniciusferrao]

The talk is really good, and I’m considering dyno now. But I’m not sure if it’s only me but that’s definitely not a back to basics talk.

[@Kalumbatsch]

for (auto& vehicle: vehicles) is the perfect use for auto. This goes back to the C IFAQ.

[@hansiraber]

great talk, lots of interesting ideas!

[@huxleyrummy9544]

So, the whole point of the talk was about how to implement the interface thing. Ok, this was in 2017, but it just scream RUST to me so loudly that I can't not notice it. This whole thing is about twisted ways on how to implement Rust's traits in C++

[@connorhorman]

Nice SBO. The main issue is that the type has to has to be nothrow move constructible or you should not use it.

[@botetescribavicentej.2326]

As always, an awesome talk. Glad to see that you are looking for a language solution to this problem. With proper reflection (meta) we could define the "interface" for some kind of classes and get several kinds of polymorphism: static (a la Concept0x concepts maps), run-time (as suggested by Herb) or type erased (as suggested by Louis), leaving 'ADL` surprises and 'virtual' functions most of the time in the dust. I believe Swift is covering static and type erased polymorphism with Protocols. Depending on the context a Protocol can be seen as a static constraint or a dynamic one. I would like to see something like that in the C++ world. In the same way we could see in the future a poly with meta-reflection (55:00) we could as well have static_ or an abstract when the Vehicle interface allows it. Just wondering on the limits of meta-reflection and what should be done using meta-reflection and what should go directly in the language. Wondering if meta-reflection wouldn't open the Pandora's box. From my side, I would prefer to have some kind of Protocol similar to the ones in Swift in C++.

[@YourCRTube]

Neat talk, probably lacks focus and balance a bit - is it about new ideas or optimizing them and the first idea is much more presented then the others. In any case good talk and great topic - polymorphism + value semantics is very interesting topic to me ever since the old "Inheritance is the base class of evil" talk.

[@Sopel997]

How would one implement 'clone idiom' with that approach? Because it's decentralized you can't just return a Vehicle, because the classes don't know about it (similarily to variant). One way would be to return void*, but that would not only be type unsafe but also you would be returning an owning raw (void) pointer (So it's useful only in the context of Vehicle class. So why not use inheritance if we already imply some connection)... You can't have std::unique_ptr. You don't have return type covariance as with inheritance. What do you do?

[@oktal3700]

The clone function of the "vtable" takes a void* parameter, pointing to uninitialized storage provided by Vehicle, and does a placement-new into this buffer?

[@Sopel997]

Sounds reasonable.

[@louisdionne7268]

Yup, this is how it works.

[@crystalgames]

great lecture , thanks

[@hungbiu8609]

This is not BASIC by any mean at all... But still, good points

[@connorhorman]

It should not just outright fail like that, it should just not participate in overload resolution when its too large

[@Bakuta1103]

I assume you're talking about the local_storage case? If so, it should just fail to compile via a static assert. The static assert allows for a clear error message and understanding on why it failed to compile. There is no need for enable_if here since there is no other constructor that would work if sizeof(T) > sizeof(aligned_storage_t)

[@thelatestartosrs]

to anyone watching this now, go watch klaus iglberger type erasure talks instead

[@mrlithium69]

Heady stuff.

[@ericcurtin2812]

Or you could just use the tried and tested decorator pattern to do this?

[@DimitrisAndreou]

Sean parent link: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3jGh4uderuAgMk

[@velho6298]

Templates, mate.

[@Sopel997]

Templates won't help you with runtime polymorphism.

[@jankodedic3130]

Not with that attitude

[@Evan490BC]

I have the impression that Louis knows his templates... Check out the Boost Hana library.

[@smestre]

Not possible when you want to distribute your library in binary form