Temporary Lifetime Extension: Complicated Cases

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/temporary-lifetime-extension-complicated-cases. Software design is difficult. One has to design features to fit past and future code. C++ Temporary lifetime extension can teach us a lesson about such design. Check more stories related to programming at: https://hackernoon.com/c/programming. You can also check exclusive content about #c++, #software-design, #learning-c++, #software-engineering, #polymorphism, #legacy, #performance-optimization, #temporary-lifetime-extension, and more. This story was written by: @bohdanlab. Learn more about this writer by checking @bohdanlab's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. This article shows us two, at the first glance, distinct examples of c++ temporary lifetime extension (TLE) feature behavior. The one where we extend temporary lifetime through polymorphic reference conversion and the one where we do it through bounding a field of a temporary directly to a reference. However, if you look deeper you will see that in some context these two examples are similar. And therefore the feature behavior in both cases should be the same. The consistency is an important aspect of any design which helps users use the feature and temporary lifetime extension can show it on its own example.