Also known as concept checking.
In 1999, SGI added concept checkers to their implementation
of the STL: code which checked the template parameters of
instantiated pieces of the STL, in order to insure that the parameters
being used met the requirements of the standard. For example,
the Standard requires that types passed as template parameters to
vector
be “Assignable” (which means what you think
it means). The checking was done during compilation, and none of
the code was executed at runtime.
Unfortunately, the size of the compiler files grew significantly as a result. The checking code itself was cumbersome. And bugs were found in it on more than one occasion.
The primary author of the checking code, Jeremy Siek, had already started work on a replacement implementation. The new code has been formally reviewed and accepted into the Boost libraries, and we are pleased to incorporate it into the GNU C++ library.
The new version imposes a much smaller space overhead on the generated object file. The checks are also cleaner and easier to read and understand.
They are off by default for all GCC 3.0 and all later versions.
They can be enabled at configure time with
--enable-concept-checks
.
You can enable them on a per-translation-unit basis with
#define
_GLIBCXX_CONCEPT_CHECKS
for GCC 3.4 and higher
(or with #define _GLIBCPP_CONCEPT_CHECKS
for versions
3.1, 3.2 and 3.3).
Please note that the concept checks only validate the requirements
of the old C++03 standard and reject some valid code that meets the relaxed
requirements of C++11 and later standards.
C++11 was expected to have first-class support for template parameter
constraints based on concepts in the core language.
This would have obviated the need for the library-simulated concept checking
described above, but was not part of C++11.
C++20 adds a different model of concepts, which is now used to constrain
some new parts of the C++20 library, e.g. the
<ranges>
header and the new overloads in the
<algorithm>
header for working with ranges.
The old library-simulated concept checks might be removed at a future date.