Summary

Some of the highlights are as follows:

• std::any is not a template class
• std::any uses Small Buffer Optimisation, so it will not dynamically allocate memory for simple types like ints, doubles… but for larger types, it will use extra new.
• std::any might be considered ‘heavy’, but offers a lot of flexibility and type-safety.
• you can access the currently stored value by using any_cast that offers a few “modes”: for example it might throw an exception or return nullptr.
• use it when you don’t know the possible types - in other cases consider std::variant.

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We will conclude with compiler support in the next lesson.