Chapter 1. Boost.TypeIndex 1.0

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
Reference
Performance

Motivation

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

typeid(T) and std::type_index require Run Time Type Info (RTTI)
typeid(T) strips const, volatile and references from type
some compilers have bugs and do not correctly compare std::type_info across shared libraries
some implementations of typeid(T) do not strip const, volatile and references
only a few STLs have std::type_index implementation
no easy way to store type info without stripping const, volatile and references
no nice and portable way to get human readable type name

Boost.TypeIndex was designed to work around those issues.

	Warning
	This library is not accepted to Boost, it is currrently waiting for review.