...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
There are some traits that can not be implemented within the current C++ language: to make these traits "just work" with user defined types, some kind of additional help from the compiler is required. Currently (April 2008) Visual C++ 8 and 9, GNU GCC 4.3 and MWCW 9 provide the necessary intrinsics, and other compilers will no doubt follow in due course.
The Following traits classes always need compiler support to do the right thing for all types (but all have safe fallback positions if this support is unavailable):
The following traits classes can't be portably implemented in the C++ language, although in practice, the implementations do in fact do the right thing on all the compilers we know about:
The following traits classes are dependent on one or more of the above:
The hooks for compiler-intrinsic support are defined in boost/type_traits/intrinsics.hpp, adding support for new compilers is simply a matter of defining one of more of the following macros:
Table 1.4. Macros for Compiler Intrinsics
BOOST_IS_UNION(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is a union type |
---|---|
BOOST_IS_POD(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is a POD type |
BOOST_IS_EMPTY(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is an empty struct or union |
BOOST_HAS_TRIVIAL_CONSTRUCTOR(T) |
Should evaluate to true if the default constructor for T is trivial (i.e. has no effect) |
BOOST_HAS_TRIVIAL_COPY(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T has a trivial copy constructor (and can therefore be replaced by a call to memcpy) |
BOOST_HAS_TRIVIAL_ASSIGN(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T has a trivial assignment operator (and can therefore be replaced by a call to memcpy) |
BOOST_HAS_TRIVIAL_DESTRUCTOR(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T has a trivial destructor (i.e. ~T() has no effect) |
BOOST_HAS_NOTHROW_CONSTRUCTOR(T) |
Should evaluate to true if |
BOOST_HAS_NOTHROW_COPY(T) |
Should evaluate to true if |
BOOST_HAS_NOTHROW_ASSIGN(T) |
Should evaluate to true if |
BOOST_HAS_VIRTUAL_DESTRUCTOR(T) |
Should evaluate to true T has a virtual destructor |
BOOST_IS_ABSTRACT(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is an abstract type |
BOOST_IS_BASE_OF(T,U) |
Should evaluate to true if T is a base class of U |
BOOST_IS_CLASS(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is a class type |
BOOST_IS_CONVERTIBLE(T,U) |
Should evaluate to true if T is convertible to U |
BOOST_IS_ENUM(T) |
Should evaluate to true is T is an enum |
BOOST_IS_POLYMORPHIC(T) |
Should evaluate to true if T is a polymorphic type |
BOOST_ALIGNMENT_OF(T) |
Should evaluate to the alignment requirements of type T. |