Do you need them?

STL Algorithms on Tuples

by Jonathan Boccara

From the article:

When you manipulate a collection of objects in C++–which is quite a common thing to do when programming in C++–STL algorithms are your loyal companions to perform operations with expressive code.

But the STL algorithms, shipped in the standard library with C++, only apply to collections that are filled at runtime, during the execution of a program (or in C++20, during the execution of constepxr code during compilation). This include the ubiquitous std::vector and std::map.

But STL algorithms don’t operate on std::tuples.

However, it could be useful to iterate over the elements of a tuple, at runtime, and perform transformations or extract information, like STL algorithms do. We will see in detail a situation where this is useful with the demux output iterator, in a future post.

Can we design algorithms that are do what STL algorithms do, but on the contents of std::tuples instead of std::vectors and std::maps?

It turns out we can.