Pragmatic Type Erasure: Solving OOP Problems w/ Elegant Design Pattern
summary
Claims that proper type erasure solves lifetime, ownership and multiple-interface OOP problems without losing performance and compares hand-rolled implementations to boost type erasure with measured timings. Demonstrates small buffer optimization, copy‑on‑write and ref_wrapper tricks to avoid heap churn, shows where heap allocations remain, and delivers a code generator using libclang that emits erased types from real headers. Source, slides and runnable examples appear on the conference GitHub and the implementations validate the performance and usability claims.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00OUTLINE
- 0:27THE IMPORTANCE OF VALUES
- 1:48EQUATIONAL REASONING
- 2:56WHY POLYMORPHISM?
- 5:50(PROBLEMS WITH) INHERITANCE AS RUNTIME POLYMORPHISM
- 10:48A QUICK CASE STUDY: WIDGETS AND LAYOUTS
- 12:09(PROBLEMS WITH) TEMPLATES AS COMPILE- TIME POLYMORPHISM
- 17:10MAKING MAGIC HAPPEN
- 29:16USE A COPY-ON-WRITE WRAPPER Instead of always copying our type erased objects.only copy them when they are mutated
- 31:26INTEGRATE COPY-ON-WRITE INTO ERASED TYPES Remove one set of allocations on construction by applying copy on write directly to the handle member.
- 31:43APPLY THE SMALL BUFFER OPTIMIZATION
- 37:26CAVEATS
- 40:46Archetype input
- 41:50Erased type output
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