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

Chapter 21

Templates and Inheritance

A priori, there might be no reason to think that templates and inheritance interact in interesting ways. If anything, we know from Chapter 13 that deriving from dependent base classes forces us to deal carefully with unqualified names. However, it turns out that some interesting techniques combine these two features, including the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern (CRTP) and mixins. In this chapter, we describe a few of these techniques.

21.1 The Empty Base Class Optimization (EBCO)

C++ classes are often “empty,” which means that their internal representation does not require any bits of memory at run time. This is the case typically for classes that contain only type members, nonvirtual function members, ...