Chapter 7. Templates and Generic Programming

The initial motivation for C++ templates was straightforward: to make it possible to create type-safe containers like vector, list, and map. The more people worked with templates, however, the wider the variety of things they found they could do with them. Containers were good, but generic programming the ability to write code that is independent of the types of objects being manipulated was even better. STL algorithms like for_each, find, and merge are examples of such programming. Ultimately, it was discovered that the C++ template mechanism is itself Turing-complete: it can be used to compute any computable value. That led to template metaprogramming: the creation of programs that execute inside C++ compilers and that stop running when compilation is complete. These days, containers are but a small part of the C++ template pie. Despite the breadth of template applications, however, a set of core ideas underlie all template-based programming. Those ideas are the focus of this chapter.

This chapter won't make you an expert template programmer, but it will make you a better one. It will also give you information you need to expand your template-programming boundaries as far as you desire.