Netrix's devLog

C++14 introduced new type of templates which are variable templates1. What it means is that it’s now possible to create template of a variable like this:

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template<class Type>
constexpr Type PI = (Type)3.1415;
 
auto v = PI<double>;

This introduces a variable that can take different values for different template parameter. Main gain comes when such value is specialized like template:

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template<>
constexpr int PI = 4;  // Because I can
 
auto v = PI<int>;

Of course in previous versions of standard this could be done in a slightly different way by using functions like this:

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template<class Type>
constexpr Type PI()
{
   return (Type)3.1415;
}
 
template<>
constexpr int PI()
{
   return 4;  // Because I can
}
 
auto v = PI<double>();

The difference in usage is “()” which is used in a function call when using function template version. But there is also another difference which makes variable template unfortunately less useful than function template. Since C++11 it is possible to delete a specialization of function template but it seems it’s not possible to delete specialization of variable template:

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template<class Type>
constexpr Type PI()
{
   return (Type)3.1415;
}
 
template<>
constexpr int PI() = delete;
 
template<class Type>
constexpr Type ANSWER = (Type)42;
 
//template<>
//constexpr double ANSWER<double> = delete;   // not possible

But of course no one says that we cannot use both as a syntactic sugar:

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template<class Type>
constexpr Type PI_VAR = PI<Type>();

1. http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/variable_template [↩]