On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 19:02:34 UTC, Dave P. wrote:
On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 18:44:20 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 18:31:54 UTC, Dave P. wrote:
Do I have to write both and have one forward to the other for
more
complicated functions?
For free functions, yes.
Is there any way to write the function as a template that is
generic over a parameter being a pointer or a reference, but
does not allow passing a copy?
Even with a templated function, you'd still need to declare the
first parameter to the function either as a pointer or as a `ref`
parameter. I'm unaware of any way to get around that. Free
functions and member functions are just different beasts
Based on you requirement to use pointers, I assume you're doing
this for a type you get from a C library. I did the same thing
for the SDL_Rect type when working with SDL. All I did was
implement a pointer version of my "extension" functions. When I
had an instance and not a pointer, I took its address when I
called the function. If that's inconvenient (lots of generic
code, perhaps), you can always have the pointer version forward
to the ref version, but it seems to me like just having the one
version is the way to go most of the time.
