One of the reasons that I’m excited for Reflection in C++ is that it can permit you to implement, as a library, many things that previously required language features. In this post, I’m going to walk through implementing P2786R8 (“Trivial Relocatability For C++26”).

Implementing Trivial Relocation in Library

by Barry Revzin

From the article:

The goal here is not to say that the design is right or wrong (although the syntax certainly is suspect), but rather to show the kinds of things that reflection can solve.

We’ll just go straight to the wording and translate it into code as we go:

Trivially Relocatable Types

Scalar types, trivially relocatable class types (11.2 [class.prop]), arrays of such types, and cv-qualified versions of these types are collectively called trivially relocatable types.

This sure sounds like a type trait! Except in the world of reflection, those are just functions. How would we implement such a thing? We could start by doing this:

consteval auto is_trivially_relocatable(std::meta::info type)
    -> bool
{
    type = type_remove_cv(type);

    return type_is_scalar(type)
        or (type_is_array(type)
            and is_trivially_relocatable(
                type_remove_all_extents(type)
            ))
        or is_trivially_relocatable_class_type(type);
}

This is a fairly literal translation, where is_trivially_relocatable_class_type is something to be written shortly. But one interesting thing about the type_remove_all_extents type trait (i.e. std::remove_all_extents) is that it also works for non-array types, just returning back the same type.