Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied

10. Visitor

This chapter discusses generic components that use the Visitor design pattern (Gamma et al. 1995). Visitor is a powerful—if controversial—design pattern that changes the dependency trade-offs involved in class design.

Visitor gives you a surprising amount of flexibility in a certain area: You can add virtual functions to a class hierarchy without recompiling them or their existing clients. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of disabling features that designers take for granted: You cannot add a new leaf class to the hierarchy without recompiling the hierarchy and all its clients. Therefore, Visitor’s operational area is limited to very stable hierarchies (you seldom add new classes) and heavy processing needs (you often ...