Re: [boost] Boost.Multimethod proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost.Multimethod proposal
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-08-22 15:35:07

How would this differ from the signals/slots library?

Robert Ramey

Andrey Semashev wrote:
> Nicholas Howe wrote:
>> I have written a C++ Multimethod library and propose adding it to
>> Boost.  I see that the addition of such a library to Boost has been
>> proposed in the past, and been met with relative enthusiasm. However, it 
>> has not been done. Does anyone know why previous
>> attempts were aborted?  I want to be sure there is a demand before
>> starting the somewhat daunting task of boostifying and documenting
>> my library. The library works by requiring clients to register user types 
>> of
>> interest, and specify their public base classes.  This allows
>> traversing class hierarchies at run-time.  A multimethod uses this
>> information to perform run-time overload resolution on registered
>> methods to determine the best implementation based on the type-id of
>> each parameter.  There are no restrictions on the types of a
>> multimethod's parameters, although only single indirections to user
>> types will behave polymorphically. The library is designed to behave well 
>> when used by other libraries.
>> To declare a new method, the client is required to derive a new type
>> from the multimethod type.  This allows multiple multimethods with
>> the same parameters in different libraries.  It also allows
>> encapsulation of each multimethod implementation within each
>> library, reducing the chance of conflict between different libraries
>> that were compiled with different versions of the multimethod
>> library. Is there any interest in including my library in Boost?
>
> I'm definitely interested. What is the complexity of calling a
> multimethod? Is the code and some examples available somewhere?
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