Thursday, July 26, 2012

decltype Insanity... a.k.a. when the return type depends on the function itself?

In a previous post I introduced basic usage of the auto and decltype keywords. In most cases the use of auto or decltype is a shortcut to avoid to manually write down the type of an object. However these two new keyword enables new capabilities of the C++ language. 

During this week I stumble on one of those cases. I don't want to overload you with the details of the specific problem I was solving therefore I will use an equivalent example just for the sake of presentation. What I want to achieve is the following, I want to write a meta-function which takes a variable number of types as input and returns a type structured as a (degenerated) binary tree. An example follows:
The way we want to write this in C++ is by defining a function which makes use of variadic templates (a feature introduced in C++11). In this way we can have a typed function accepting an unbounded number of arguments. However if you start declaring the function signature you will soon realize that you cannot write the return type of this function:
How get around this? So, first of all we have to realize that the return type depends on the type and number of the parameters of the function. Fortunately, C++11 introduced the so called trailing return types, which, as the name suggests, enable the return type of a function to be specified after the input parameters (so that the actual function parameter types can be used in the return type). A second thing we must do, because meta-programming is heavily based on recursion, we must define a termination case for the recursion which, in this case boils down to a function accepting 2 arguments and returning the composition of the two bundled into a pair object.
Now the only thing remaining is to write down the return type of this function. Basically what we want to write in the return type is that my return type is a pair object where the first argument is the type of Arg1 while the second argument is the return type of the recursive invocation of the same function on the rest of the provided arguments. And, thanks to decltype, we can write it down as:
Now we can test whether everything is working by using the following simple main:
I have to admit I was quite impressed for a couple of seconds when I saw the first two tests working, I suppose at this point I have to point out which kind of C++ compiler I am using. Currently in my machine I have installed GCC 4.7.1. Considering that many C++ compilers are still struggling to support variadic templates and GCC can already eat code like this, it is quite cool. As my research activity mostly focuses around compilers, I was wondering how could GCC internally determine the type of the makeTree function considering that the type depends on itself. However I soon find out that GCC is not that smart, indeed if we try to invoke the function with more that 3 arguments the compiler generates the following error:
test.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, char**)’:
test.cpp:26:22: error: no matching function for call to ‘makeTree(int, int, int, int)’
test.cpp:26:22: note: candidates are:
test.cpp:8:24: note: template<class LhsTy, class RhsTy> std::pair<_T1, _T2> makeTree(const LhsTy&, const RhsTy&)
test.cpp:8:24: note:   template argument deduction/substitution failed:
test.cpp:26:22: note:   candidate expects 2 arguments, 4 provided
test.cpp:13:6: note: template<class Arg1, class Arg2, class Arg3, class ... Args> std::pair<Arg1, decltype (makeTree(arg2, arg3, makeTree::args ...))> makeTree(const Arg1&, const Arg2&, const Arg3&, const Args& ...)
test.cpp:13:6: note:   template argument deduction/substitution failed:
test.cpp: In substitution of ‘template<class Arg1, class Arg2, class Arg3, class ... Args> std::pair<Arg1, decltype (makeTree(arg2, arg3, args ...))> makeTree(const Arg1&, const Arg2&, const Arg3&, const Args& ...) [with Arg1 = int; Arg2 = int; Arg3 = int; Args = {int}]’:
test.cpp:26:22:   required from here
test.cpp:13:6: error: no matching function for call to ‘makeTree(const int&, const int&, const int&)’
test.cpp:13:6: note: candidate is:
test.cpp:8:24: note: template<class LhsTy, class RhsTy> std::pair<_T1, _T2> makeTree(const LhsTy&, const RhsTy&)
test.cpp:8:24: note:   template argument deduction/substitution failed:
test.cpp:13:6: note:   candidate expects 2 arguments, 3 provided
Which made me very sad. Now I wonder if the C++ code I wrote fails because of a faulty implementation of the GCC compiler or if what I wrote is not valid C++11 code. Comments are welcome. 

C++ <3

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