Providing a better error message when someone tries to use std::vector<bool> as a buffer

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Developer Blogs - Feed.

Last time, we looked at how we could generate a useful error message if somebody tried to pass std::vector<bool> to our buffer_view class. The std::vector<bool> is unlike all the other std::vector<T> types because it does not require its storage to be in the form of a traditional C array, which means that it is not possible to obtain direct access to the underlying storage.

Last time, we struggled with this buffer type:

struct buffer_view
{
  template<typename C>
  buffer_view(std::vector<C> const& v) :
    data(v.data()), size(v.size() * sizeof(C)) { }

  // Imagine other constructors for std::array, etc.

  void const* data;
  std::size_t size;
};

If somebody tries to create a buffer_view from a std::vector<bool>, they get an incomprehensible error message because there is no v.data() method. (For some reason, gcc and clang do have a data() method, but it doesn't return anything interesting, so the error message is even more incomprehensible.)

We addressed the problem last time by introducing an overload of the constructor that is active only for std::vector<bool>, and putting a static_assert in the body with a deceptively type-dependent expression so that the assertion wasn't raised until the overload was invoked.

I noted that Kenny Kerr came up with a simpler solution: Move the call to data() to a helper function, and templatize that helper.

struct buffer_view
{
  template<typename C>
  buffer_view(std::vector<C> const& v) :
    data(get_data(v)), size(v.size() * sizeof(C)) { }

  // Imagine other constructors for std::array, etc.

  void const* data;
  std::size_t size;

private:
  void const* get_data(std::vector<C> const& v)
  {
    static_assert(!is_same_v<C, bool>,
      "Can't use std::vector<bool>. Try std::array instead.");
    return v.data();
  }
};

The static_assert comes ahead of the call to v.data(), so it becomes the first error message.

You could go even further and make it the only error message by adding some if constexpr:

  void const* get_data(std::vector<C> const& v)
  {
    static_assert(!is_same_v<C, bool>,
      "Can't use std::vector<bool>. Try std::array instead.");
    if constexpr (!is_same_v<C, bool>) {
      return v.data();
    } else {
      return nullptr;
    }
  }