Rethink Polymorphism in C++

To implement polymorphism and heterogeneous collections the usual approach is to use inheritance and virtual functions. However, that approach has significant flaws: * You have to use pointers and references * You have to use heap memory * You have to be careful with the lifetime of objects to avoid using destroyed objects and having memory leaks Recommended approaches for safer C++ like shared pointers cause their own problems (especially for the performance of a program).

So what is the best approach to deal with polymorphism and heterogeneous collections?

There are possible options you might not be familiar with, using: * Variadic templates * Move semantics * std::variant

This talk gives an overview about the problem and the options.