C++ templates

C++ templates allow us to define functions and classes that work with generic types. This allows a function or a class to accept any type, and it only has to be written once. This is what we want. We want to define a single get/set function for components, and we'll template them to make them generic and flexible.

Let's take a look at a practical example of templates to get a better idea of how they actually work.

Using templates

Let's suppose that we require a function to add two numbers, and we want to support a range of types. To achieve this, we could declare a function for each type that we want to support, as follows:

int Add(int value1, int value2)
{
	return value1 + value2;
}

double Add(double value1, double value2)
{
    return value1, value2;
}

Looking at these two functions, the only thing that is different about them is their return and parameter types. How great would it be if we could say "Don't worry about the type, I'll give you it later" and just have one function...