Question

At my workplace, we tend to use iostream, string, vector, map, and the odd algorithm or two. We haven’t actually found many situations where template techniques were a best solution to a problem.

What I am looking for here are ideas, and optionally sample code that shows how you used a template technique to create a new solution to a problem that you encountered in real life.

As a bribe, expect an up vote for your answer.

Answer 1

I’ve used a lot of template code, mostly in Boost and the STL, but I’ve seldom had a need to write any.

One of the exceptions, a few years ago, was in a program that manipulated Windows PE-format EXE files. The company wanted to add 64-bit support, but the ExeFile class that I’d written to handle the files only worked with 32-bit ones. The code required to manipulate the 64-bit version was essentially identical, but it needed to use a different address type (64-bit instead of 32-bit), which caused two other data structures to be different as well.

Based on the STL’s use of a single template to support both std::string and std::wstring, I decided to try making ExeFile a template, with the differing data structures and the address type as parameters. There were two places where I still had to use #ifdef WIN64 lines (slightly different processing requirements), but it wasn’t really difficult to do. We’ve got full 32- and 64-bit support in that program now, and using the template means that every modification we’ve done since automatically applies to both versions.