Introduction to Template Metaprogramming
Explore the fundamentals of C++ template metaprogramming, including templates, type traits, and constexpr, to understand how code can generate other code at compile time. Learn to create function and class templates that enhance performance by minimizing runtime overhead and code duplication.
We'll cover the following...
We will begin with an introduction to template metaprogramming.
Metaprogramming in c++
When writing regular C++ code, it is eventually transformed into machine code. Metaprogramming, however, allows us to write code that transforms itself into regular C++ code. In a more general sense, metaprogramming is a technique where we write code that transforms or generates some other code. By using metaprogramming, we can avoid duplicating code that only differs slightly based on the data types we use, or we can minimize runtime costs by precomputing values that can be known before the final program executes. Nothing stops us from generating C++ code by using other languages. We could, for example, do metaprogramming by using preprocessor macros extensively or writing a Python script that generates or modifies C++ files for us:
Even though we could use any language to produce regular code, with C++, we have the privilege of writing metaprograms within the language using templates ...