Austin C/C++ Presentations - Pragmatic Type Erasure

Join us at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, August 6th as Zach Laine presents "Pragmatic Type Erasure: Solving Classic OOP Problems with an Elegant Design Pattern!" Doors will open at 6:30 so please arrive ahead of time so we can get ready.

There are numerous, serious OOP design problems that we have all encountered in production code. These include, among others:

• object lifetime/ownership - how to make classes from different class hierarchies conform to a common interface
• writing classes that can present multiple interfaces
• separating interface and implementation
• how to write virtual functions so that subclasses override them properly - the virtual inheritance "diamond of death"

Proper use of type erasure can mitigate, or outright eliminate, these and other problems, without sacrificing performance.

This talk will cover the OOP design problems above and more, and will cover hand-rolled and library-based type erasure approaches that solve those problems. Performance metrics will be provided for the different approaches, and source code will be available after the talk.

Zach Laine has been using C++ in industry for 11 years, focusing on data visualization, numeric computing, games, generic programming, and good library design. He finds the process of writing bio blurbs to be a little uncomfortable.

The talk will take place at Rackspace's Austin office, located on the East side of IH-35 right before Rundberg and after Henna Chevrolet (there is a sign for Rackspace which is visible from the highway). Feel free to park in the same lot as the big Rackspace flag.