Question

I discovered template metaprogramming more than 5 years ago and got a huge kick out of reading Modern C++ Design but I never found an opertunity to use it in real life.

Have you ever used this technique in real code?

Contributors to Boost need not apply ;o)

Answer 1

I once used template metaprogramming in C++ to implement a technique called ‘symbolic perturbation’ for dealing with degenerate input in geometric algorithms. By representing arithmetic expressions as nested templates (i.e. basically by writing out the parse trees by hand) I was able to hand off all the expression analysis to the template processor.

Doing this kind of thing with templates is more efficient than, say, writing expression trees using objects and doing the analysis at runtime. It’s faster because the modified (perturbed) expression tree is then available to the optimizer at the same level as the rest of your code, so you get the full benefits of optimization, both within your expressions but also (where possible) between your expressions and the surrounding code.

Of course you could accomplish the same thing by implementing a small DSL (domain specific language) for your expressions and the pasting the translated C++ code into your regular program. That would get you all the same optimization benefits and also be more legible — but the tradeoff is that you have to maintain a parser.