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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Polymorphism with Unions

by Jason Lucas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Using tagged unions to create families of polymorphic types that are more flexible and more easily maintained than those formed with inheritance alone. We demonstrate the design pattern and implementation techniques of sum types with examples from a compiler development project. We also examine the technique's impact on project management and engineering and on algorithm design, including the role of type switches, value type semantics, and multiple dispatch polymorphism.