Re: Templates for syntatic niceness only, does it waste space?

From:

"mlimber" <mlimber@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

23 Jul 2006 06:51:46 -0700

Message-ID:

<1153662706.257927.43900@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>

collection60@hotmail.com wrote:

Hi people,

I want to use templates, for syntatic niceness only, not for doing
similar operations on different types. The types I'm manipulating are
basically just pointers. So if it's a pointer to a Fred or a pointer to
a long, it makes no difference.

So, I want the exact same code, to be running on different types. So
even if I used this template on 1000 different types, I'd want only one
copy of that code in my executable, I do not want the size of my
executable to go up with the number of types used by this template.

Is that how it works? Can I get syntactic niceness without getting code
bloat?

If you're using the same code to manipulate many disparate pointer
types, chances are you're not doing much significant with them (e.g.,
you aren't using the interface for Fred, using them polymorphically,
etc.). So just declare the function inline, and things will likely be
the same (since "inline" is only a hint) as if you wrote that pointer
manipulating code in each place where you call the function.

Cheers! --M