On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 2:18 PM Ville Voutilainen <ville.voutilainen@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 00:01, Richard Smith <richardsmith@google.com> wrote:
> I thought the usual way you write ADL-only calls is
>
> template<typename T> void f(T t) {
>   using somewhere::name;
>   name(t); // ADL-only call with fallback to somewhere::name
> }

The "name" in this case is "get", and it needs to be called with a
numeric template argument.

> (eg, this is how I think we would recommend that people call 'begin' and 'end': "using std::begin; begin(x);"). I think that works equally well if 'somewhere' contains a function template, even if you don't have anything to put in namespace 'somewhere':
>
> namespace somewhere {
>   template<typename T> void name(...) = delete; // specialization missing
> }
> template<typename T> void f(T t) {
>   using somewhere::name;
>   name<int>(t); // ADL-only call with fallback to somewhere::name
> }
>
> This works without a feature test macro, and is more reliable than relying on the new feature. (For example, the above pattern is not broken if someone incautiously adds a non-function, non-function-template 'name' to a scope enclosing 'f', whereas use of the new feature would be broken by that.)

All we want is to be able to write QPair<What, Ever> qp; get<1>(qp);

I don't know what that "somewhere" would be, nor do I know why I'd
write a using-declaration for somewhere::get.

Consider:

// user.h
struct get {};

// user.cc
#include "user.h"
#include <QPair>

That won't compile with your above approach. Unqualified lookup for 'get' finds the user's struct ::get, so ADL is not performed. Adding the using-declaration fixes the problem:

// QPair
namespace detail {
  template<int> void get(...) = delete;
}
void whatever() {
  using detail::get; // add this to fix the problem
  QPair<What, Ever> qp;
  get<1>(qp); // ::get not found by unqualified lookup, so ADL is performed now
}

If you have some default implementation of 'get' (such as a general unspecialized one), then you could 'using' that instead of using a placeholder one like detail::get.