Draft for OOPSLA 2012 Open and Efficient Type Switch for C++ Yuriy Solodkyy Gabriel Dos Reis Bjarne Stroustrup Texas A&M University Texas, USA fyuriys,gdr,
[email protected] Abstract – allow for independent extensions, modular type-checking Selecting operations based on the run-time type of an object and dynamic linking. On the other, in order to be accepted is key to many object-oriented and functional programming for production code, the implementation of such a construct techniques. We present a technique for implementing open must equal or outperform all known workarounds. However, and efficient type-switching for hierarchical extensible data existing approaches to case analysis on hierarchical exten- types. The technique is general and copes well with C++ sible data types are either efficient or open, but not both. multiple inheritance. Truly open approaches rely on expensive class-membership To simplify experimentation and gain realistic prefor- testing combined with decision trees []. Efficient approaches mance using production-quality compilers and tool chains, rely on sealing either the class hierarchy or the set of func- we implement our type swich constructs as an ISO C++11 li- tions, which loses extensibility [9, 18, 44, 51]. Consider a brary. Our library-only implementation provides concise no- simple expression language: tation and outperforms the visitor design pattern, commonly exp ∶∶= val S exp + exp S exp − exp S exp ∗ exp S exp~exp used for type-casing scenarios in object-oriented programs. For many uses, it equals or outperforms equivalent code in In an object-oriented language without direct support for languages with built-in type-switching constructs, such as algebraic data types, the type representing an expression-tree OCaml and Haskell.