Breaking Dependencies: Type Erasure - A Design Analysis
summary
Claims that replacing inheritance with type erasure significantly reduces coupling and simplifies maintenance by extracting operations from domain types into a value wrapper that erases concrete types at runtime. Implementation uses a templated constructor, an internal model/base pair and a clone method (prototype) to provide value semantics, combining external polymorphism with the classic bridge and prototype patterns. The concrete build is a Shape wrapper that stores circles/squares without pointers in user code, works at runtime, and has libraries (boost type_erasure dyno zoo) and SBO strategies to regain performance.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:10Design and dependencies challenge
- 4:59Naive inheritance problems
- 9:32Strategy design pattern
- 23:28Strategy pattern limitations
- 26:58What type erasure is
- 31:58External polymorphism
- 37:19Bridge and prototype patterns
- 42:13Type erasure with shapes
- 50:28Benefits and trade-offs
- 56:26Q&A
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