Templates across API boundaries: Powerful but problematic

Stephen Cross, Undo Software
Embedded.com (March 07, 2016)

C++ is controversial. For every discussion about it, a certain percentage of people will love it and another substantial group will hate it. Above all, one feature highlights this divide: templates. Templates have many problems: they slow compile times, force implementations to be specified in headers and can bloat generated code. However they’re also a powerful mechanism for programming against generic types.

There can be no doubt that templates are a key part of the C++ language; the standard library relies on them heavily and they’ve been adopted throughout libraries such as Boost. This series of articles explains the problems with C++ templates and outlines new and exciting approaches for enhancing their capabilities and eliminating their drawbacks. In this first part, I define templates and discuss problems engineers have faced in dealing with templates across API boundaries.

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