Awesome

Python-style kwargs in C++

When dealing with functions that have lots of optional parameters, or at least for which resonable defaults are readily available, it's often a bit of a frustration in C++. Generally defaults are specified during a function as in:

double BinarySearch(std::function<double(double> fn,
                    int max_depth = 16, double epsilon = 1e-9,
                    double lower_bound = 0, double upper_bound = 100);

And then if we call BinarySearch with only one parameter then the call will use the default values for the rest. But what if I want to specify custom bound, but use the defaults for the other parameters? Admittedly, this is a contrived example since bounds are less likely to be optional then the others, and we could reorder them better going from most-likely-to-be-specified to least, but it's easy to see how something more flexible would be desirable.

Consider then the following two code snippets. Which is more readable?

First snippet:

double solution = BinarySearch(fn, 0, 100);

Second snippet:

double solution = BinarySearch(fn, lower_bound = 0, upper_bound = 100);

I really like the way that optional arguments work in python with kwargs. I'd love to have that same kind of functionality in C++. kwargs.h implements one mechanism of achieving this.

How does it work

kwargs takes advantage of variadic templates in C++ to build up a single data structure which contains all of the optional parameters (I'll call this a "parameter pack"). Each optional parameter of type T is stored in a structure of type Arg<tag,T> where tag is a unique numeric identifier associated with a particular optional argument key.

The parameter pack data structure derives from Arg<tag,T> for each (tag,T) pair that shows up in the list of optional arguments.

Overloading of the equals (=) operator gives us an opportunity for building the (tag,T) pairs within the parameter list of the function call.

See more documentation and examples on github pages.

Examples

#include <iostream>
#include "kwargs.h"

// these are tags which will uniquely identify the arguments in a parameter
// pack
enum Keys {
  c_tag,
  d_tag
};

// global symbols used as keys in list of kwargs
kw::Key<c_tag> c_key;
kw::Key<d_tag> d_key;

// a function taking kwargs parameter pack
template <typename... Args>
void foo(int a, int b, Args... kwargs) {
  // first, we construct the parameter pack from the parameter pack
  kw::ParamPack<Args...> params(kwargs...);

  std::cout << "foo:\n--------"
            << "\na: " << a
            << "\nb: " << b
  // We can attempt to retrieve a key while providing a default fallback value.
  // If c_key is in kwargs then this will return the value associated with
  // that key, and will have the correct type. Note that the type of the default
  // parameter in this case is const char*.
            << "\nc: " << kw::Get(params,c_key,"null");
  // We can also do stuff conditionally based on whether or not arg exists in
  // the param pack. We still need to provide a default value, since we need to
  // know the return type of the Get function when the key is not in kwargs.
  // In this case, the default value wont ever be used at runtime.
  if( kw::ContainsTag<c_tag,Args...>::result ) {
    std::cout << "\nd: " << kw::Get(params,d_key,0);
  }

  std::cout << "\n\n";
}

int main( int argc, char** argv )
{
  foo(1, 2);
  foo(1, 2, c_key=3);
  foo(1, 2, c_key=3, d_key=4);
  foo(1, 2, d_key=4);
}