What are some uses of template template parameters?

Question

I\'ve seen some examples of C++ using template template parameters (that is templates which take templates as parameters) to do policy-based class design. What other uses do

Answer 1

I use it for versioned types.

If you have a type versioned through a template such as MyType<version>, you can write a function in which you can capture the version number:

template<template<uint8_t> T, uint8_t Version>
Foo(const T<Version>& obj)
{
    assert(Version > 2 && "Versions older than 2 are no longer handled");
    ...
    switch (Version)
    {
    ...
    }
}

So you can do different things depending on the version of the type being passed in instead of having an overload for each type. You can also have conversion functions which take in MyType<Version> and return MyType<Version+1>, in a generic way, and even recurse them to have a ToNewest() function which returns the latest version of a type from any older version (very useful for logs that might have been stored a while back but need to be processed with today's newest tool).

Answer 2

Here's another practical example from my CUDA Convolutional neural network library. I have the following class template:

template <class T> class Tensor

which is actually implements n-dimensional matrices manipulation. There's also a child class template:

template <class T> class TensorGPU : public Tensor<T>

which implements the same functionality but in GPU. Both templates can work with all basic types, like float, double, int, etc And I also have a class template (simplified):

template <template <class> class TT, class T> class CLayerT: public Layer<TT<T> >
{
    TT<T> weights;
    TT<T> inputs;
    TT<int> connection_matrix;
}

The reason here to have template template syntax is because I can declare implementation of the class

class CLayerCuda: public CLayerT<TensorGPU, float>

which will have both weights and inputs of type float and on GPU, but connection_matrix will always be int, either on CPU (by specifying TT = Tensor) or on GPU (by specifying TT=TensorGPU).

Answer 3

I think you need to use template template syntax to pass a parameter whose type is a template dependent on another template like this:

template <template<class> class H, class S>
void f(const H<S> &value) {
}

Here, H is a template, but I wanted this function to deal with all specializations of H.

NOTE: I've been programming c++ for many years and have only needed this once. I find that it is a rarely needed feature (of course handy when you need it!).

I've been trying to think of good examples, and to be honest, most of the time this isn't necessary, but let's contrive an example. Let's pretend that std::vector doesn't have a typedef value_type.

So how would you write a function which can create variables of the right type for the vectors elements? This would work.

template <template<class, class> class V, class T, class A>
void f(V<T, A> &v) {
    // This can be "typename V<T, A>::value_type",
    // but we are pretending we don't have it

    T temp = v.back();
    v.pop_back();
    // Do some work on temp

    std::cout << temp << std::endl;
}

NOTE: std::vector has two template parameters, type, and allocator, so we had to accept both of them. Fortunately, because of type deduction, we won't need to write out the exact type explicitly.

which you can use like this:

f<std::vector, int>(v); // v is of type std::vector<int> using any allocator

or better yet, we can just use:

f(v); // everything is deduced, f can deal with a vector of any type!

UPDATE: Even this contrived example, while illustrative, is no longer an amazing example due to c++11 introducing auto. Now the same function can be written as:

template <class Cont>
void f(Cont &v) {

    auto temp = v.back();
    v.pop_back();
    // Do some work on temp

    std::cout << temp << std::endl;
}

which is how I'd prefer to write this type of code.

Answer 4

Here is a simple example taken from 'Modern C++ Design - Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied' by Andrei Alexandrescu:

He uses a classes with template template parameters in order to implement the policy pattern:

// Library code
template <template <class> class CreationPolicy>
class WidgetManager : public CreationPolicy<Widget>
{
   ...
};

He explains: Typically, the host class already knows, or can easily deduce, the template argument of the policy class. In the example above, WidgetManager always manages objects of type Widget, so requiring the user to specify Widget again in the instantiation of CreationPolicy is redundant and potentially dangerous.In this case, library code can use template template parameters for specifying policies.

The effect is that the client code can use 'WidgetManager' in a more elegant way:

typedef WidgetManager<MyCreationPolicy> MyWidgetMgr;

Instead of the more cumbersome, and error prone way that a definition lacking template template arguments would have required:

typedef WidgetManager< MyCreationPolicy<Widget> > MyWidgetMgr;