Chapter 1. Boost.TypeIndex 2.1

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Table of Contents

Motivation

Getting started

Examples

Getting human readable and mangled type names
Storing information about a type in container
Getting through the inheritance to receive a real type name
Exact type match: storing type with const, volatile and reference

Boost.TypeIndex Header Reference

Header <boost/type_index.hpp>
Header <boost/type_index/type_index.hpp>
Header <boost/type_index/template_index.hpp>
Header <boost/type_index/template_info.hpp>
Header <boost/type_index/type_info.hpp>

Space and Performance

Code bloat

Compiler support

Mixing sources with RTTI on and RTTI off

Acknowledgements

Motivation

Sometimes getting and storing information about a type at runtime is required. For such cases a construction like &typeid(T) or C++11 class std::type_index is usually used. And that is the point, where problems start:

typeid(T) and std::type_index require Run Time Type Info (RTTI)
some implementations of typeid(T) strip const, volatile and references from type, while others don't
some compilers have bugs and do not correctly compare std::type_info objects across shared libraries
only a few implementations of Standard Library currently provide std::type_index
no easy way to store type info without stripping const, volatile and references
no nice and portable way to get human readable type names

Boost.TypeIndex library was designed to work around all those issues.

	Note
	`T` means type here. Think of it as of `T` in `template <class T>`

	Warning
	During the Boost review was decided, that it is better to use interface close to v1.0 of this library. Version 3.0 will attempt to fix all the issues found during the review.