Still more variants of variant - Odin Holmes
Channel: Using std::cpp
Date: 19/05/2023

There are many implementations of the variant design pattern. However, I am still not convinced we have fully explored this design space.

In this talk, I will start with a small refresher on how std::variant works and how it differs from QVariant and boost variants 1 and 2 as well as the concept of visitation. As powerful as these 4 implementations are there are still many cases that they do not support. I will give some examples.

After laying that groundwork the meat of the talk will be about how to extend these concepts beyond fixed layout variants and explore the implementability of a customizable variant adopter pattern. This will allow us to adopt data structures who's types we do not control, like events from the OS or packets received over a wire, to be visitable like other variants only by adding type information and without changing the layout.

See the full program at: https://eventos.uc3m.es/93418/programme/using-std-cpp-2023.html