I’ve recently been been writing lots of modern C++ code with variadic templates. For instance , I’ve been trying to make libsigc++ use variadic templates instead of being a mess of generated code.

I often find myself needing utility functions and type traits to manipulate tuples, but the C++ standard library still only offers std::tuple_cat(). Writing these is awkward and that often stops me from experimenting quickly.

So I’m gradually gathering this code together in a little murrayc-tuple-utils library. I’d gladly change the name if this gets any use. Really, I’m surprised that nothing like this seems to exist already, apart from as part of larger projects such as boost::hana and boost::fusion. But boost is a really awkward dependency and those are larger projects with much grander goals.

So far murrayc-tuple-utils has:

tuple_cdr(): Removes the first element.

tuple_start<N>(): Takes the first N elements.

tuple_end<N>(): Takes the last N elements.

tuple_subset<pos, len>: Takes len elements, starting at pos.

tuple_interlace<T1, T2>: Takes elements from each tuple, interlacing (or zipping) them together.

For each of them, there are also type traits, such as tuple_type_cdr<>::type, though these are not so necessary now that C++14 has decltype(auto) for return types.

These are just enough code to make things work enough for me when I’m in a rush. I’m sure they can be improved, and maybe this is how to get those patches and pull requests.

The project has a complete autotools build structure, with “make check” tests, Doxygen documentation building, a pkg-config .pc file, etc, so you can try it out, improve it, and add to it, without having to mess around with that stuff.