Re: [boost] "Simple C++11 metaprogramming"

Subject: Re: [boost] "Simple C++11 metaprogramming"
From: Eric Niebler (eniebler_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-06-04 13:31:27

On 6/2/2015 3:42 AM, Peter Dimov wrote:
> Bruno Dutra wrote:
>> Still, laziness and SFINAE friendliness are the properties I deem most
>> fundamental on any metaprogramming library.
> 
> I meant to respond to these points too.
> 
> The eagerness of template aliases is an obvious problem in at least one
> place and that place is mp_if, where the naive mp_if<P<T>, F<T>, G<T>>
> evaluates both F<T> and G<T>. But I'm not sure if there are others,
> under the assumption that we've no higher-order constructs. Eric
> Niebler's meta has an entire lazy:: namespace with deferred copies of
> all its constructs; continuing the general theme, I wonder whether all
> this is strictly needed once we jettison the lambda part.

In my experience, meta::defer (and all the stuff in meta's lazy::
namespace) is useful outside of lambdas. You want to defer computations
for branches and short-circuit evaluation (if, and, or) where the
branch(es) not taken would have hard errors; or for compile-time
optimization, to avoid computing results you won't use. This is real,
and has nothing to do with lambdas.

> SFINAE friendliness can be quite a curse. It often transforms reasonably
> comprehensible error messages into full-scale Agatha Christie mysteries
> (the compiler output even being of comparable length). So I'm not
> convinced (at the moment) that a metaprogramming library should be
> SFINAE-friendly. I presently tend to lean towards the philosophy of
> static_assert'ing as much as possible, and leaving the primary templates
> undefined instead of empty.

I made Meta SFINAE-friendly on a lark and found it useful in practice.
(See this thread[*] where Louis and I compared common_type
implementations with Meta and Hana.) Of course you're right about
mysterious errors, and I don't feel I have a good response yet.

[*] http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2015/03/220446.php

-- 
Eric Niebler
Boost.org
http://www.boost.org