Dave Steffen - How Do I Switch Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

How Do I Switch Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

We have been switching on enums for decades. In modern C++, we can recognize a switch-on-enum as a kind of hard-coded, compile-time associative data structure lookup.

As seen last month, there are a variety of alternatives (using compile-time maps and such) that may be preferable.

This talk will discuss two questions.

1. Can we replace switch statements with compile-time maps? Is it technically feasible? What are the runtime performance issues?
2. Do we want to? Do we get design benefits? Testing benefits? Maintainability benefits? It turns out that the line between code and compile-time data gets fuzzy, and raises surprisingly deep philosophical points.

This talk will start from and build on Scott Rytting's talk last month, but go in some different directions.

(And yes there will be unit tests)

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There is a discord for the meetup that you can join https://discord.gg/98T5XPWcrA to help foster remote interaction!
We always plan to go to the Burns pub for social hour after the presentation.

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This month food will be supplied by Alteryx. Please answer the question so we know how many people are attending in person, and if you have any dietary needs.

Thank you to our sponsors:

• Trimble for event space and soft drinks
• Alteryx for food