Question

I would like to provide a templated function, that varies its implementation (->specialization) according to the sizeof the template type.

Something similar to this (omitted typecasts), but without the if/elseif:

template<class T>
T byteswap(T & swapIt)
{
    if(sizeof(T) == 2)
    {
        return _byteswap_ushort (swapIt);
    }
    else if(sizeof(T) == 4)
    {
        return _byteswap_ulong(swapIt);
    }
    else if(sizeof(T) == 8)
    {
        return _byteswap_uint64(swapIt);
    }
            throw std::exception();
}

I know there are many roads to reach my goal, but since I try to learn about SFINAE and type traits I’m particularly interested in solutions using those techniques to decide at compile time which specialization to choose and which calls are not admitted.

Perhaps implementing a class trait is_4ByteLong and using boost::enable_if…

I have to admit, I’m stuck right now, so I thank you for any help or advice

Answer 1

You don’t need SFINAE or type traits. Vanilla template specialization is enough. Of course it must be specialized on structs as C++(98) doesn’t support function template partial specialization.

template <typename T, size_t n>
struct ByteswapImpl
/*
{
  T operator()(T& swapIt) const { throw std::exception(); }
}
*/    // remove the comments if you need run-time error instead of compile-time error.
;

template <typename T>
struct ByteswapImpl<T, 2> {
  T operator()(T& swapIt) const { return _byteswap_ushort (swapIt); }
};

// ...

template <typename T>
T byteswap(T& swapIt) { return ByteswapImpl<T, sizeof(T)>()(swapIt); }