Re: covariant return types with CRTP

From:
"iwongu" <iwongu@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
28 Aug 2006 08:28:59 -0400
Message-ID:
<1156738791.172917.93420@74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com>

Unfortunately, during the instantiation of clonable<D,B> the class D
is still an incomplete type, so the the compiler can't tell that the
return types are covariant.

There have been numerous discussions about this, just try to seach
clc++m. The best solution seems to be


I'm sorry for not searching first.

I found your reply from the search result. (http://tinyurl.com/pyvms)
In that reply, you wrote, "It may seem that the compiler _could_
already know this,"

Is this not knowing problem caused from Standard or
compiler-implemetation thing? I could not find this case in 14.7.1/1.

template <typename Derived,typename Base>
class Clonable : Base{
public:
    Derived* clone() const{
        return static_cast<Derived*>(this->do_clone());
    }
private:
    virtual Clonable* do_clone() const{
        return new Derived(static_cast<const Derived&>(*this));
    }
};

class ClonableBase{
public:
    ClonableBase* clone() const{
        return do_clone();
    }
private:
    virtual ClonableBase* do_clone() const=0;
};

You get pretty much everything you need including
pseudo-covariant returns. This is, however, as good as it gets.


This is good enough to me. I couldn't think about using name-hiding.
;-)

Thanks,

iwongu

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