On May 30, 2011, at 11:02 AM, Matt Calabrese wrote:

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Gordon Woodhull <gordon@woodhull.com> wrote:

(Hoping that Matt Calabrese's proposed Boost.Generic will be up and running later this year!)

If you have a list of features you need and what compilers you are using, I can try to focus my efforts. I'd imagine you'll be making heavy use of associated templates, which I don't have yet, and for the time being they will only be able to work in clang as that's the only compiler I know of that currently supports template aliasing.

Well, of course until I heard your talk I had planned to do without concepts because they didn't exist. But here is the problem I am trying to solve; perhaps you can tell me if this is possible.

A system of objects at compile time is a graph of types and their relations. Where I am hoping concepts will help is to be able to define abstractly what sort of interfaces exist between these types, and then validate that the concrete implementation meets the concepts.

So, I think this requires carrying concepts as metadata in the edges of a compile-time graph specified by the Metagraph user, and then traversing both the abstract and the concrete graphs validating the types against the concepts they are supposed to implement.

I am okay with clang-only for now since I'm only doing validation. I don't think I would try to use concept maps or archetypes in a first pass, although those will surely help in the long run.