## abstraction design and implementation: repeat

7 november 2017

You know that you're obsessed with library design and abstractions when a simple for loop like this one...

for(int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
{
foo();
}

...greatly bothers you.

What's wrong with it?

Assuming that there's nothing special about foo(), the code above works properly and doesn't have any bug. There's nothing "wrong" with it. Except for the fact that it doesn't clearly express its intent.

Ask yourself - "what does the code snippet above mean?" It is just trying to invoke foo() ten times. In other words, it is trying to repeat an action $$n$$ times.

If that's the case, why do we need to:

• Use a low-level looping construct;

• Create a local variable i, give it a type and initialize it to 0;

• Increment i on every iteration.

This is unnecessary boilerplate, which masks the intent of the code and allows the introduction of subtle bugs (e.g. using <= instead of <, or dangerous implicit conversions).

### welcome, abstractions!

In my previous "passing functions to functions" and "zero-overhead C++17 currying & partial application" articles I've praised C++11 (and newer standards) for allowing us to write "more functional" code. In particular, I discussed "higher-order functions". These concepts will be used throughout the article - I'm going to assume your familiarity with them from now on.

If I want to repeat an action $$n$$ times, I exactly want to write that in my code:

repeat(10, []
{
foo();
});

Cannot get simpler than that - let's implement it!

template <typename N, typename F>
constexpr void repeat(N n, F&& f)
{
for(N i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
f();
}
}

As you can see from the godbolt.org link above, repeat is completely inlined by both g++ and clang++ with -O2. You should not be surprised by this - templates and lambda expressions are completely transparent to the compiler.

Even in this simple repeat implementation, there is an interesting point to note:

• We marked repeat as constexpr... even though it returns void. If you're asking yourself "does this even make sense?" the answer is yes, and it's best explained with this example on godbolt.org. Getting rid of constexpr would prevent it from compiling. The lesson to learn here is that constexpr doesn't imply immutability - mutable state is allowed (and often useful) during compile-time computations. Note that lambdas are implicitly constexpr when possible since C++17.

Unfortunately, this implementation is not completely correct. It doesn't properly propagate noexcept-ness! In order to fix that, we need to add a noexcept specifier composed of various noexcept operator checks, which make sure that all the operations we use inside the body are indeed noexcept:

template <typename N, typename F>
constexpr void repeat(N n, F&& f)
noexcept(noexcept(f())
&& noexcept(N(0))
&& noexcept(n < n)
&& noexcept(++n)
)
{
for(N i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
f();
}
}

This is important if you're trying to write a noexcept-friendly library: the user could pass a custom type to repeat that exposes an int-like interface but may throw. Unfortunately this compromises the readability of the implementation.

### "but what if I need the index?"

While the pattern seen at the beginning of the article involving the for loop is extremely common, the snippet below is just as easy to find in any codebase:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
{
foo(i);
}

...crap. Our repeat is not powerful enough to handle this! (Unless you use a mutable lambda, but it definitely won't win a beauty pageant.)

An easy solution would be introducing a new function, called repeat_with_index:

repeat_with_index(10, [](int i)
{
foo(i);
});

While this works and it's trivial to implement, it just feels wrong to have two different functions for such a small difference in behavior. Additionally, if an user suddenly realizes he/she now needs an index in his/her repeat call, changing the signature of the lambda is not enough - the invoked function must be different as well.

What I want is repeat to "detect" whether or not the passed closure can be invoked with an index, and if so just pass it as an argument. In short, these two repeat calls below must compile and work as expected:

repeat(5, []
{
foo();
})

repeat(5, [](int i)
{
foo(i);
})

Before we implement this new, more flexible version of repeat, let's stop for a second and think about noexcept. noexcept is the devil and feeds on human offspring.

Why?

Because in this particular situation it forces you to take a beautiful piece of code, and replace it with poop.

In order to understand my frustation, please consider this "noexcept-incorrect" version of the proposed repeat:

template <typename N, typename F>
constexpr void repeat(N n, F&& f)
{
for(N i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
if constexpr(std::is_invocable_v<F&&, N>)
{
f(i);
}
else
{
f();
}
}
}

This implementation of repeat is, in my opinion, beatiful. We are using C++17's constexpr if in order to elegantly and locally decide whether to pass i to f or not. We are also using std::is_invocable_v to check whether or not f can be invoked with i.

The best thing about this implementation is that everything is in a single function and that the control flow is easy to reason about. Unfortunately, it is incorrect, as it does not propagate noexcept-ness.

The issue here is that noexcept(noexcept(e)) only accepts an expression e, and doesn't allow us to pass a compound statement. Therefore, if we want to make sure that this version of repeat is noexcept-correct, we need to abandon constexpr if... :(

Here's a noexcept-correct version of repeat:

template <typename N, typename F>
constexpr auto repeat(N n, F&& f)
noexcept(noexcept(f(n))
&& noexcept(N(0))
&& noexcept(n < n)
&& noexcept(++n)
)
-> std::enable_if_t<std::is_invocable_v<F&&, N>>
{
for(N i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
f(i);
}
}

template <typename N, typename F>
constexpr auto repeat(N n, F&& f)
noexcept(noexcept(f())
&& noexcept(N(0))
&& noexcept(n < n)
&& noexcept(++n)
)
-> std::enable_if_t<!std::is_invocable_v<F&&, N>>
{
for(N i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
f();
}
}

While the common noexcept expressions and the std::enable_if_t can be refactored to avoid some repetition, this implementation of repeat is nowhere as easy to understand/maintain than the previous one using constexpr if. We now require two overloads, two for loops, and a lot of extra boilerplate.

Note that this situation gets even worse when you also need to provide a SFINAE-friendly return type. I discussed this in more depth in my "You must type it three times" lightning talk.

I strongly believe that the language should provide a way of automatically deduce noexcept-ness from the body of a function (and also a way of deducing SFINAE-friendly return types). There has been an attempt to standardize noexcept(auto) in the past, but the paper was rejected. The closest thing we have nowadays is the "Abbreviated Lambdas for Fun and Profit" by Barry Rezvin, which proposes a new syntax for lambda bodies which would automatically generate noexcept specifier and SFINAE-friendly return type - unfortunately it is proposed to only work with expressions, and not for compound statements.

### lessons learned

I wanted to tell you about multiple unrelated things with this article. Here are, in my opinion, the key takeaways:

• Try to find a way to directly express your intent in your code. This sometimes requires creating new abstractions, even for trivial things such as a for loop.

• Compilers are really good at inlining/optimizing templates and lambda expressions. Unless you use the wrong tools for the job, general-purpose abstractions revolving around higher-order functions should be cost-free.

• Marking functions returing void as constexpr makes sense and can be useful.

• Abstractions can become more flexible and more user-friendly if introspection and various forms of "detection" are used. In this case, we generalized repeat to work both with and without indices. Consider this while writing a library function - you usually want to maximize user friendliness and ease of refactoring.

• C++17's constexpr if can lead to very simple and beautiful code - branching at compile-time becomes easy and natural.

• Library developers who care about noexcept-correctness and SFINAE-friendliness have a really hard time. They might not be able to use auto as a return type or compound statements if they want the compiler to help with return type deduction and noexcept(noexcept(...)). This unnecessarily complicates libraries and widens the abyss between "library code" and "user code". If a non-expert C++ developer wants to share a nice abstraction that helped him/her write some business code, it will be likely incorrect under these aspects. I strongly believe that the language must be improved to prevent these situations.

I hope you enjoyed this unusual, mixed article - I'm planning to write a short sequel covering repeat<I>, a similar abstraction that instead of looping at run-time, loops at compile-time (i.e. generates unrolled code and provides access to the index in a constexpr-friendly manner).

The next article in the series, "compile-time repeat & noexcept-correctness", covers a compile-time version of repeat and the importance of noexcept-correctness.