An Introduction to Type Traits and Conditional Compilation

Type traits are an important metaprogramming technique that enables us to inspect properties of types or to perform transformations of types at compile-time. Type traits are themselves templates, and we can see them as metatypes. Knowing information such as the nature of a type, its supported operations, and its various properties is key for performing conditional compilation of templated code. It’s also very useful when writing a library of templates.

Overview of type traits and conditional compilation

In this section, we’ll learn the following: