Type erasure techniques

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All type erasure techniques in C++ are done with function pointers (for behaviour) and void* (for data). The “different” methods simply differ in the way they add semantic sugar. Virtual functions, e.g., are just semantic sugar for

struct Class {
    struct vtable {
        void (*dtor)(Class*);
        void (*func)(Class*,double);
    } * vtbl
};

iow: function pointers.

That said, there’s one technique I particularly like, though: It’s shared_ptr<void>, simply because it blows the minds off of people who don’t know you can do this: You can store any data in a shared_ptr<void>, and still have the correct destructor called at the end, because the shared_ptr constructor is a function template, and will use the type of the actual object passed for creating the deleter by default:

{
    const shared_ptr<void> sp( new A );
} // calls A::~A() here

Of course, this is just the usual void*/function-pointer type erasure, but very conveniently packaged.

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