CppCon 2014: Yuriy Solodkyy "Accept No Visitors"

Visitor Design Pattern was an attempt to overcome a limitation of object-oriented languages – the inability to retroactively introduce new polymorphic functions. While it was quite efficient in providing extensibility of functions, it was never truly retroactive, easy to teach, use or maintain, and it achieved this at the cost of hindering extensibility of classes, introduction of control inversion and requiring tons of boilerplate code to be written. Visitor Design Pattern is a workaround, not a solution to the problem, and in this talk I would like to discuss a more elegant yet as efficient solution in the form of a Match statement. We will look at several use‑cases for the Visitor Design Pattern, their encoding using both approaches and ultimately their advantages and disadvantages. Yuriy Solodkyy received his PhD from Texas A&M University, while working under the supervision of Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup on the ways to simplify the analysis of C++ programs. He is currently trying to materialize some of those ideas while working in the Visual C++ team at Microsoft. His research interests include C++, generic programming, and abstract interpretation.