C++17 in Detail: A Deep Dive/

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The Basics

The Basics

The basics talk about the former kind of exceptions thrown, and when to use std::any.

We'll cover the following...

​In C++14 there weren’t many options for holding variable types in a variable. You could use void*, of course, but this wasn’t safe. void* is just a raw pointer, and you have to manage the whole object lifetime and protect it from casting to a different type.

Potentially, void* could be wrapped in a class with some type discriminator.

class MyAny
{
    void* _value;
    TypeInfo _typeInfo;
};

Making Type-Safe

As you see, we have some basic form of the type, but there’s a bit of coding required to make sure MyAny is type-safe. ...