Question

Say B and C are derived from A. I want to be able to test whether any two instances of classes derived from A are instances of the same class, that is, whether A* foo and A* bar both point to B instances, without using RTTI. My current solution is something like this:

class A {
protected:

    typedef uintptr_t Code;
    virtual Code code() const = 0;

}; // class A


class B : public A {
protected:

    virtual Code code() const { return Code(&identity); }

private:

    static int identity;

}; // class B


class C : public A {
protected:

    virtual Code code() const { return Code(&identity); }

private:

    static int identity;

}; // class C

Using this method, operator== can simply test first.code() == second.code(). I’d like to remove the literal identity from the derived classes and have the code found automatically by A, so that not all of the derived classes have to repeat this idiom. Again, I would strongly prefer not to use RTTI. Is there any way to do this?

Note: I have seen recent questions [1] and [2], and this is not a duplicate. Those posters want to test the contents of their derived classes; I merely want to test the identities.

Answer 1

You should just use RTTI instead of reinventing the wheel.

If you insist on not using RTTI, you could use CRTP and a function-local static variable to avoid having to write the function to every derived class. Adapt from this example code I wrote for Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiously_recurring_template_pattern#Polymorphic_copy_construction

Another alternative is reading the vtable pointer (via this and pointer arithmetics), but that would depend on both the compiler and the platform, so it is not portable.