Real world examples of metaprogramming
Advanced metaprogramming can appear to be very academic, so in order to demonstrate its usefulness we'd like to provide some examples which not only demonstrate the syntax of metaprogramming, but how it can be used in practice.
Example 1 – Reflection
The term reflection is the ability to inspect a class without knowing anything about its content.
In this case we are going to limit the reflection to give classes the ability to iterate their members just like we can iterate the members of a tuple. By using reflection we can create generic functions for serialization or logging which automatically works with any class. This reduces large amounts of boiler plate code traditionally required for classes in C++.
Making a class reflect its members
In contrast to many other programming languages, C++ does not have built in reflection, which means we have to write the reflection functionality ourselves. In this case we simply expose the member variables via a member...
