Better Enums

Welcome to the Better Enums tutorials! The code in this tutorial forms a valid program, which you can download and play with. The program runs as part of the automated test suite.

Representation

Let's go over some of the low-level properties of a Better Enum. This time, we will declare a more unusual enum than the ones we have seen.

#include <cassert>
#include <iostream>
#include <enum.h>

BETTER_ENUM(ContentType, short,
     CompressedVideo = 5, PCM = 8, Subtitles = 17, Comment = 44)

This is for a hypothetical multimedia container file format. Perhaps the files have sections, and each one has a header:

struct Header {
    ContentType     type;
    short           flags;
    int             offset;
};

---

Here is what we have.

int main()
{
    assert(sizeof(ContentType) == 2);

ContentType behaves just like a short¹, in fact it simply wraps one. This makes it possible to lay out structures in a predictable fashion:

    Header      header = {ContentType::PCM, 0, 0};

    assert(sizeof(header) == 8);
    assert((size_t)&header.flags - (size_t)&header.type == 2);

---

uint16_t is called ContentType's underlying or representation type. If you want to know the representation type of any enum you have declared, it is available as the member type ::_integral:

    ContentType::_integral  untrusted_value = 44;

Use this if you want a sized field to receive untrusted data, but aren't willing to call it ContentType yet because you have not validated it. Your validator will likely call ::_from_integral_nothrow, perform any other validation your application requires, and then return ContentType.

    ContentType             type =
        ContentType::_from_integral(untrusted_value);
    std::cout << type._to_string() << std::endl;

---

You have probably noticed the initializers on each of the constants in ContentType. This allows you to declare sparse enums for compatibility with external protocols or previous versions of your software. The initializers don't need to be literal integers — they can be anything that the compiler would accept in a normal enum declaration. If there was a macro called BIG_FAT_MACRO declared above, we could have written Subtitles = BIG_FAT_MACRO. We could also have written Subtitles = CompressedVideo.

---

The in-memory representation of an enum value is simply the number it has been assigned by the compiler. You should be safe passing enums to functions like fread and fwrite, and casting memory blocks known to be safe to struct types containg enums. The enums will behave as expected.

---

    return 0;
}

Continue to the next tutorial: Compile-time usage

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