Function Template Specialization in C++

friedo writes "About.com has an excellent two-part article (Part 1, Part 2) by Eric Nagler, author of "Learning C++," about "specializing" function templates in C++. "Rather than specifying an explicit type of all of the arguments or the return value in the definition of a function, placeholders are used. This reduces the need to create and maintain multiple copies of a function for different parameter types. But sometimes, it is not possible to write a single function template that works efficiently or even correctly for every argument type. It is in these cases that function template specialization is useful.""

Comments

Re:Why is this here?

[devphil]

It's a very basic introduction to a very deep subject. Anyone who knows C++ knows the vast majority of this information.

Good question. I don't know why.

Frankly, if you want to see what templates and partial specialization can really do, go get Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design, from the In-Depth series (which I've posted on before, somewhere). As others have said before, the third chapter alone is worth the price of the book, just for what it will do for your understanding of specializations.

I would post a link to Alexandrescu's site, but he's recently done something to it which causes mozilla to either crash instantly or hang indefinitely, requiring a kill -KILL in a console. Looks like either Java or frames.

Re:Why is this here?

[orthogonal]

get Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design

Agreed. A mind-blowing book, it will challenge your ideas about how to code.

It's about more than just C++ templates; although its use of templates is revolutionary, the more general and important message of the book is about designing small, re-usable pieces of code that interact gracefully with each other (and to the extent possible, interact at compile-time rather than run-time). These ideas can, in theory, be applied to any langauge that supports class typing; in practice I've used in in pre-generics Java to a small (and non-revolutionary) extent.

If you program in any significant way in C++, you owe it to yourself to get the book, if for no other reason than to re-experience that sense of wonder you felt when you compiled your first program.