# A metaprogramming puzzle: Overly interoperable libraries

Here’s an open problem I posted in the cpplang Slack the other day. I don’t claim that it’s a realistic or practically interesting problem, mind you! But it’s a metaprogramming problem that I think ought to have some clever solution; maybe if I blog it, someone will tell me what that clever solution is.

Consider this code (backup). We have three interacting “libraries” here:

• In the global namespace, operator^ gets defined for any pair of types T, U such that enable_xor<T,U>::value is true. Notice that the definition of enable_xor<T,U> influences the existence of operator^(T,U), but not its behavior.

• In the Foolib namespace, class Foo enables enable_xor<Foo, U> for any type U such that U::foolib_compatible is true.

• In the Barlib namespace, class Bar enables enable_xor<T, Bar> for any type T such that T::barlib_compatible is true.

So far, operator^(Foo, Bar) does not exist.

Now Foolib’s maintainer makes Foolib aware of Barlib: Set Foo::barlib_compatible to true. operator^(Foo, Bar) starts working. Awesome.

Now, Barlib’s maintainer makes Barlib aware of Foolib: Set Bar::foolib_compatible to true. operator^(Foo, Bar) stops working. Wait, what?

Well, when both of the classes are aware of each other, we have two competing (and equally good) partial specializations. When the compiler tries to instantiate enable_xor<Foo, Bar>, it can’t decide which partial specialization to use — it’s ambiguous — and so enable_xor<Foo, Bar> becomes ill-formed.

My metaprogramming puzzle is:

Find a way to fix this, in the general case, for n different libraries, any subset of which might be aware of any of the others. All of the libraries should use the same mechanism. The mechanism may be parameterized by something for uniqueness, such as the library’s name or GUID.

Here’s a possible solution; its downside is that it is super-duper inefficient in the general case. (Godbolt; backup) The old mechanism, the one that didn’t work, was:

template<class U>
struct enable_xor<Foolib::Foo, U,
std::enable_if_t<U::foolib_compatible>>
: std::true_type {};


We replace that with a priority_tag-based function overload, where the priority of the tag is some globally unique random integer.

template<class T, class U,
std::enable_if_t<std::is_same<T, Foolib::Foo>::value, int> = 0,
std::enable_if_t<U::foolib_compatible, int> = 0>
int enable_xor(priority_tag<42>);  // Our GUID is "42"


operator^ decides whether to exist based on whether the expression enable_xor<T,U>(priority_tag<99>{}) is well-formed. If any of our n libraries have provided an enable_xor<T,U> for any priority_tag<K> (for 0 <= K <= N), then this function call will be well-formed and unambiguous: the highest K will win out.

If two libraries pick the same K, then we have an ambiguity again. But we can fix that with big numbers, right? Just make our overload resolution start at priority_tag<99999> instead of priority_tag<99>, right?

Unfortunately, no! Compilers don’t like to deal with nested template instantiations beyond, say, 900 levels of nesting; let alone 99999 levels. So in practice this mechanism cannot support more than 900 different GUIDs. That’s not very “globally unique”! I would say that this mechanism, as presented, does not scale.

To really “scale,” I think a solution would have to support at least 10,000 different GUIDs (which really means only about 100 coexisting libraries, because of the birthday paradox). Even better would be a mechanism supporting 264 different GUIDs, or even arbitrarily many (e.g., something based on strings of arbitrary lengths), or even a mechanism that didn’t use GUIDs at all.

Can you solve it?