In c++17, std::any was added to t he standard library. Boost had their own version of "any" for quite some time before that.

I've been trying to think of a case where std::any is the best solution, and I honestly can't think of one. std::any can hold a variable of any type at runtime, which seems incredibly useful until you consider that at some point, you will need to actually use the data in std::any. This is accomplished by calling std::any_cast with a template argument that corresponds to the correct type held in the std::any object.

That means that although std::any can hold a type of any object, the list of valid objects must be known at the point that the variable is any_cast out of the std::any object. While the list of types that can be assigned to the object is unlimited, the list of types that can be extracted from the object is still finite.

That being said, why not just use a std::variant that can hold all the possible types that could be any_cast out of the object? Set a type alias for the std::variant, and there is no more boilerplate code than you would have otherwise. As an added benefit, you ensure type safety.

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I've been trying to learn a system language because it would enable me to access a whole new world of possibility for games, tools, and potential projects. My main problem when learning the language are:

• can I write modern C++ code using the newer standards and still compile with libraries from older standards?
• how do I even organize a C++ project? Look at the linked project, the CMakeList.txt is so hard to understand, the syntax looks so hard to write.
• how do I install dependencies? You're going to laugh at me, but I always used languages with package managers and I looked again at the linked project, and they write a whole CMakeList.txt to import ImGui (GUI library I wanna try) but if you compare the structure of the files, it's different from the ones on the repository of ImGui.

As you see there are a lot of problems and it pains me to not be able to solve them because Rust is so unfun to use and work with! Do you think I should try C++, carry one with it?

Thanks, hector.

@bloomberg published experimental #clang support for ISO C++26 #reflection!

https://github.com/bloomberg/clang-p2996

#cplusplus #cpp #cxx @cpp #llvm #hpc