[boost] Boost bind "improvement"?

From: Herve Bronnimann (hervebronnimann_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-16 13:43:07

Peter and David (and others :-)

Boost.bind currently has the limitation that a binder will not be invoked with non-const rvalues, as was very nicely explained in the "Forwarding Problem" (document http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2002/n1385.htm).

In that paper, you discuss a possible solution which you deem impractical, i.e. to add all 2^N overloads mixing & and const& for the invocation arguments.  Indeed, Boost.bind already supports 9 arguments and 2^9 is a large number...

However, I fail to see the shortcoming in the following approach: add 2*N (not 2^N) overloads, one set of N where all arguments are taken as &, and another set of N where all the arguments are taken as const&. If any invocation argument is a non-const lvalue, then all arguments will be taken as & (first set of overloads) since this is the only one that will match.  And if all arguments can be passed to a const&, then the second set of overloads will provide a better match than the first, hence no ambiguity.

Such an extension would allow boost.bind to forward non-const rvalues, in the case where none of the arguments is a non-const lvalue.  So the example showing the limitation of the current solution #1 in the document cited above will then work. You still will not be able to forward a mix of non-const lvalues and rvalues, but it may not happen very frequently (most return arguments I use in my code are passed by address, in C style, and an address can be matched to a "T* const&").  Also, the cost is not high (what's an extra 9 overloads, when you already have 9 :-)

My question is: Is there something I am missing that would create problems in the usage of Boost.bind, if the second set of overloads were added (besides the inconvenience of more overloads and a longer source code to parse for the compiler)?  

BTW, I am not necessarily advocating that Boost.bind provide the const& overloads, although I think it would be nice if there are no problems associated with it.

Thanks for any thoughts,
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Herve Bronnimann