A little C++0x finger exercise

Since the C++ compiler of GCC 4.3.2 comes with partial C++0x support and I had not tested all of these features yet, I decided to do a little finger exercise: “function”.

“function” is a useful library feature of Boost, TR1, and the upcoming C++ standard library. It’s basically a class template mimicing the behaviour of a function pointer. But it’s much more flexible because it applies to any “callable object” — function pointers and objects with overloaded function call operator. Also, the signatures don’t have to match perfectly as long as the parameters and return values are implicitly convertible. I’m going to show you how this library feature can be implemented with C++0x features — including variadic templates and rvalue references. But before going into any details let me give an example of how code that uses this “function” library might look like. In case you’re already familiar with this library feature you can skip the following piece of code and paragraph of text.

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Surprizing C++ reference-binding rules

Isn’t it amazing? You see a very simple piece of code that looks perfectly fine and wonder why it is supposed to be ill-formed:

  struct foo {
    foo();
  private:
    foo(const foo& rhs);
  };

  void func1(const foo&);

  void func2() {
    foo o;
    func1( o ); // ok
    func1( foo() );  // ill-formed, foo's copy-ctor is private
  }

Although an rvalue is allowed to bind to a reference-to-const, the C++ standard allows a compiler to copy an rvalue to another temporary rvalue before binding it to a reference-to-const. Obviously, you need to have a public copy constructor for that.

I really fail to see the merit in this rule. It seems that every available C++ compiler does not create an extra temporary object here and some of these compilers don’t even bother to report an error in this situation (g++ version 3.4.5 accepts the above code).

Fortunately, the upcoming version of the C++ standard removes the CopyConstructible requirement for reference binding. It makes the code above well-formed.

Source: this usenet thread

– P