Templates accepting “anything” in C++

Question

I have a simple template struct associating a string with a value

template struct Field
{
    std::string name; T self;
}

Answer 1

A couple of things...

• C++11 (which you seem to have since you are talking about std::initializer_list) does have typed variadic arguments, in particular they are named variadic templates

• Java generics and C++ templates are completely different beasts. Java generics create a single type that stores a reference to Object and provides automatic casting in and out to the types in the interface, but the important bit is that it performs type erasure.

I would recommend that you explain the problem you want to solve and get suggestions for solutions to your problem that are idiomatic in C++. If you want to really mimic the behavior in Java (which, I cannot insist enough is a different language and has different idioms) you can use type erasure in C++ manually (i.e. use boost::any). But I have very rarely feel the need for full type erasure in a program... using a variant type (boost::variant) is a bit more common.

If your compiler has support for variadic templates (not all compilers do), you can always play with that, but stashing the fields for later in a vector may be a bit complicated for a fully generic approach unless you use type erasure. (Again, what is the problem to solve? There might be simpler solutions...)