C++ Templates: The Complete Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17

Future Directions

C++ templates have been evolving almost continuously from their initial design in 1988, through the various standardization milestones in 1998, 2011, 2014, and 2017. It could be argued that templates were at least somewhat related to most major language additions after the original 1998 standard.

The first edition of this book listed a number of extensions that we might see after the first standard, and several of those became reality:

• The angle bracket hack: C++11 removed the need to insert a space between two closing angle brackets.

• Default function template arguments: C++11 allows function templates to have default template arguments.

• Typedef templates: C++11 introduced alias templates, which are similar. ...