CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++templatesvariadic-templates
Unl1ght
Unl1ght

Reputation: 107

Explicit specialization of member function with variadic template arguments

I am writing a templated Event Handler that allows the user to send events (in the form of structs) to connected listeners.

I have an "emit" member function that will construct an Event object from the provided variadic template parameters and forward the event. However, I would like to provide a specialised "emit" function that will detect if the provided argument is a pre-constructed Event object, in which case I could forward the event without making a superfluous copy.

My initial attempt...

template <typename T_Event>
class EventHandler
{
public:

  template <typename... T_Args>
  void emit(T_Args&&... args)
  {
    printf("variadic\n");
    deliver(T_Event {std::forward<T_Args>(args)...});
  }

  void emit(const T_Event& event)
  {
    printf("reference\n");
    deliver(event);
  }

  ...
};

I used the following logic to try out both of the emit functions, but it turns out the variadic template function always takes precedence over the const reference function.

struct Event { int x; };

EventHandler<Event> handler;
Event event {1};
handler.emit(event);
handler.emit(2);

After some more research I managed to acheive my goal by defining two versions of the variadic template function and using enable_if to execute the correct one.

  template <typename... T_Args>
  void emit(T_Args&&... args)
  {
    printf("variadic\n");
    T_Event event {std::forward<T_Args>(args)...};
    deliver(event);
  }

  template <typename... T_Args, typename = std::enable_if<std::is_same<const T_Event&, T_Args...>::value>>
  void emit(T_Args&&... args)
  {
    printf("reference\n");
    deliver(std::forward<T_Args>(args)...);
  }

This solution worked exactly as I need when I compile with GCC, but if I compile with CLANG I get the following error message:

  call to member function 'emit' is ambiguous
handler.emit(event);

  candidate function [with T_Args = <EventB &>]
void emit(T_Args&&... args)

  candidate function [with T_Args = <EventB &>, $1 =
  std::__1::enable_if<false, void>]
void emit(T_Args&&... args)

I assume that I am close to the correct solution, can anyone explain what I am doing wrong?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 680

Answers (1)

Sam Varshavchik
Sam Varshavchik

Reputation: 118445

The trick is to force the variadic template to fail overload resolution for the parameter pack that consists of a single (optional reference to an optional const-qualified) parameter.

This is done by dropping references and const-qualifiers from each type in the parameter pack, assembling a tuple out of them, and using std::is_same, just like in your attempt, to compare the resulting type to std::tuple<T_Event>, and then fail overload resolution in that case by negating the type traits (it is not a std::tuple<T_Event>.

#include <type_traits>
#include <tuple>
#include <iostream>

template <typename T_Event>
class EventHandler
{
public:

    template <typename... T_Args,
          typename=std::enable_if_t
          <std::negation<std::is_same
                 <std::tuple<std::remove_const_t
                         <std::remove_reference_t
                          <T_Args>>...>,
                          std::tuple<T_Event>>
                              >::value>>
    void emit(T_Args&&... args)
    {
        std::cout << "Variadic" << std::endl;
    }

    void emit(const T_Event& event)
    {
        std::cout << "Reference" << std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    EventHandler<const char *> foo;
    const char *bar="foobar";

    foo.emit(4);
    foo.emit(4, "bar");
    foo.emit(bar);
    return 0;
}

Tested with g++ with -std=c++17. This should be doable with C++11 and C++14 by reimplementing some of the missing type traits. End result:

$ g++ -o t -std=c++17 t.C
$ ./t
Variadic
Variadic
Reference

Upvotes: 3

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