Hi Samuel,

To give it a shot I try to add variant support to "distance" taking
"correct" as an example. Binary operation are more challenging since
support for combinations (variant, variant), (non-variant, variant),
(variant, non-variant) needs to be implemented.

You have an example of that in the equals algorithm.

Moreover, if the variant
has 2d and 3d points, the dimension of both geometry must be checked to
be the same.

Basically I'm changing the was we handle algorithms to a multi stage process. Where the only stage so far was dispatch, now we have:

- 1) variant resolution

- 2) default strategy resolution (after variant resolution because possibly depends on the concrete geometry)

- 3) dispatch

After the variant resolution stage what you have on hand is guaranteed to be a concrete geometry (or combination of concrete geometries). So you can proceed to concept checks, default strategy resolution and so on. I had put the concept check into a separate input_check stage and finally put it directly in variant resolution, in the overload where resolution is done. Not sure what will be the final choice but you get the point: anything that depends on concrete geometries must be done after variant_resolution.

That raise the question how to report runtime errors ?
Exception ?

It's not a runtime error, as variant types are a compile time information. Applying the multi stage resolution as described above will automatically reject any variant that could possibly result in trying to compute the distance between a 2D and a 3G geometry - e.g. passing instances of variant<point<double, 2>, point<double, 3> > in parameters for distance will result in a compile time error. One might argue it's too conservative, as at run-time we won't necessarily end up asking for the fatal combination. But I want to leverage variants type safety as much as possible.

Does that mean that we can dispatch incompatible variant to a runtime
error using not_yet_implemented ? That would be brilliant !

Again, we go conservative here. Passing variants that could result in computing a not yet implemented operation will result in a compile time error.

Regards
Bruno