The goal of this talk is to get you familiar and comfortable with the ins and outs of a basic implementation of type erasure in C++.
Using an implementation of a value wrapper for polymorphic types as an example, we'll examine how type erasure works that is similar to std::any.
In contrast to universally used pointer or reference semantics, in this case the wrapper with value semantics allows us to treat polymorphic, type erased, objects as ordinary values: move them around, copy, and assign new values, with all the headaches of ownership and cloning handled by the implementation behind the scenes.
The idea behind a value wrapper was thoroughly discussed by Jonathan Boccara in his keynote at Meeting C++ 2020 here.
Description on the conference site:
https://nastachku.ru/fun-with-type-erasure-delaem-obertku-s-semantikoy-znacheniya-dlya-polimorfnyh-tipov (broken)
Slides: