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Adam Crockett 🌀
Adam Crockett 🌀

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C++ how do I store any value in a map

I am writing an emscripten compiled web assembly project to get Lua working alongside node, this is working out very nicely because I can get values from Lua back into CPP. I have bootstraped a node.js clone module system so this means I will always get a module.exports table back. What I'd love to know is how can I iterate over this table and convert it to a cpp map to return to JavaScript. I'm using c++17 I think...

Anyways hope any inspirational ideas can help. Much wow and thanks.

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Andrew Andersen

In general, you need sum type (tagged union, etc. -- it has many names).
In C++ there is no built-in ST, but there are std::any and std::variant (second is better, I think). Both of them can be found at cppreference.com

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Thank you, Andrew that's good to know, I have spotted both types but couldn't get it to compile std::any or std::variant. Might have to look into CPP supported versions for emscripten.

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Andrew Andersen • Edited

I had some business with Arduino recently, so I wrote my implementation of Variant without typeinfo: Pastebin (there is unused get_type struct, don't get confused with it)
Compiles and works with g++ -std=c++11 and g++ -std=c++17

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Andrew Andersen • Edited

If you can include typeinfo, it's not so hard to implement class like Any by yourself
If you're familiar with C++ variadic templates (who knows), you can make Variant by yourself
If you don't manage to include standart Any or Variant, and you need sum type with fixed number of hidden (I don't know how to call them) types you can make template Variant class (it will be pretty ugly, but it'll work, hehe)

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Thank you so much for thinking to come back here and post that. My project has come a long way now. I had some help from the maintainers of sol. A Lua CPP helper library. But I really should look into polymorphism. Currently I haven't even used CPP classes. Everything is in functions for better or worse.