When C++11 introduced move semantics, it also added two important helper functions: std::move and std::forward. They are essential when you want to manually indicate that you no longer care about an object or need to propagate the value category in generic code. As such, I’ve used them countless times in the past.

However, they are functions. Plain, old, standard library functions.

This is problematic for multiple reasons.

Suppose you need to have a variadic function and want to add all arguments together. Before C++17, you need two pseudo-recursive functions:

template <typename H, typename ... T>
auto add(H head, T... tail)
{
    return head + add(tail...);
}

template <typename H>
auto add(H head)
{
    return head;
}

However, C++17 added fold expressions, making it a one-liner:

template <typename H, typename ... T>
auto add(H head, T... tail)
{
    return (head + ... + tail);
    // expands to: head + tail[0] + tail[1] + ...
}

If we’re willing to abuse operator evaluation rules and fold expressions, we can do a lot more. This blog posts collects useful tricks.

You probably know that C++20 adds ranges. Finally we can write copy(container, dest) instead of copy(container.begin(), container.end(), dest)!

Ranges also do a lot more. Among other things, they add a new way of specifying an iterator to the end – sentinels.

I recently had an insight about type erasure that I wanted to share. Type erasure is a combination of two techniques working together to achieve both polymorphism and value semantics: std::polymorphic_value, a proposed standard library type, and duck typing.

I wanted to write this blog post about (a specific part of) naming things back in July, but ironically I didn’t have a name for the symptom I wanted to describe. I only found a good name when I attended Kate Gregory’s talk on naming at CppCon, and now I finally have the time to write my thoughts down.

So I want to write about naming. In particular, about the phenomenon that sometimes a name is a perfect description of what a function does, yet it is totally useless.