Ah. Dyno (https://github.com/ldionne/dyno) is good at this stuff. If you have types Base, Child1, Child2, you can just return a Dyno object that can be any of these, expressed as a tagged union and not a Box-equivalent, and then do regular vtable-based or otherwise polymorphic dispatch into the object. You can also arrange it so that if you have a Child3 that can't fit in the (Base, Child1, Child2) union, the Child3 can be heap-allocated and invoked transparently as well. It's open-world type erasure.
C++ is so freakishly powerful is that it can not only solve this problem, but it can solve it via a regular library and not a language extension.
Dyno is really freakish and I can see a couple of pain points if someone tries to use it productively. A IMO glaring one is that dyno::poly is a boxing type that will happily take your value type and shove it on the heap while nobody's looking. This is a defect similar to the silent heap allocations for captured parameters in std::function.
On the other hand, it's really impressive that one can push dynamic function pointer lookup tables in C++ to a point where it looks almost, but maybe not quite like the real thing.
Comments
Ah. Dyno (https://github.com/ldionne/dyno) is good at this stuff. If you have types Base, Child1, Child2, you can just return a Dyno object that can be any of these, expressed as a tagged union and not a Box-equivalent, and then do regular vtable-based or otherwise polymorphic dispatch into the object. You can also arrange it so that if you have a Child3 that can't fit in the (Base, Child1, Child2) union, the Child3 can be heap-allocated and invoked transparently as well. It's open-world type erasure.
C++ is so freakishly powerful is that it can not only solve this problem, but it can solve it via a regular library and not a language extension.
Dyno is really freakish and I can see a couple of pain points if someone tries to use it productively. A IMO glaring one is that dyno::poly is a boxing type that will happily take your value type and shove it on the heap while nobody's looking. This is a defect similar to the silent heap allocations for captured parameters in std::function.
On the other hand, it's really impressive that one can push dynamic function pointer lookup tables in C++ to a point where it looks almost, but maybe not quite like the real thing.
It is the real thing. Not "almost". The actual thing. If you want to forestall accidental heap policy, make a storage policy that prohibits it.