Re: Trade-offs of templated implementations

From:
CornedBee <wasti.redl@gmx.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 10 Jun 2011 09:23:22 CST
Message-ID:
<33521f36-3117-4baf-8411-e1f0c3098864@eq2g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>
On 9 Jun., 23:50, Olivier <olivier.gr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I'd like some comments on the pros and cons of three different
approaches of the same simple logic (best practice, code performance,
generated code, etc ...) :

1) Only runtime evaluation.

   class MyClass
   {
   public:
      MyClass( bool tof )
         : tof_(tof)
      { }

      void func0( int i )
      {
         if(tof_)
         {
            auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints_.begin(), ints_.end(),
i, std::less<int>());

            // ...
         }
         else
         {
            auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints_.begin(), ints_.end(),
i, std::greater<int>());

            // ...
         }
      }

   private:
      bool const tof_;
      std::vector<int> ints_;
   };


If you need both kinds to be the same type (i.e. you only know at
runtime), this is the way to go out of necessity.
If this algorithm is only a small part of the class, it's probably
also the way to go.

2) Compile-time evaluation.

   template< bool ToF >
      class MyClass
      {
      private:
         template< typename Tp, bool >
            struct Comp
            {
               bool operator()( Tp const &lhs, Tp const &rhs ) const
               { return lhs < rhs; }
            };

         template< typename Tp >
            struct Comp<Tp,false>
            {
               bool operator()( Tp const &lhs, Tp const &rhs ) const
               { return lhs > rhs; }
            };

      public:
         void func0( int i )
         {
            auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints_.begin(), ints_.end(),
i, Comp<int,ToF>());

            // ...
         };

      private:
         std::vector<int> ints_;
      };


I would implement this as

auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints.begin(), ints.end(), i,
     typename std::conditional<ToF, std::less<int>,
std::greater<int>>::type());

This has the advantage of being concise. There is probably no relevant
speed advantage over the purely runtime version, since in relation to
the lower_bound algorithm the single branch before it is quite
irrelevant.

3) Runtime branching based on a compile-time value. I take it most
compilers would remove the useless branch.

   template< bool ToF >
      class MyClass
      {
      public:
         void func0( int i )
         {
            if(ToF)
            {
               auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints_.begin(),
ints_.end(), i, std::less<int>());

               // ...
            }
            else
            {
               auto iter = std::lower_bound(ints_.begin(),
ints_.end(), i, std::greater<int>());

               // ...
            }
         };

      private:
         std::vector<int> ints_;
      };


This probably produces the same code as #2. But I don't like ifs based
on template parameters. Feels like a confusion of concepts to me.

Sebastian

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