Tag Archives: dynamic_cast

Casting – what could possibly go wrong?

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Type casting in C++ is a form of what is known in computer science as type punning – that is, circumventing the type system of a programming language.

C++ inherits its conversion and casting mechanism from C, but supplements it (although sensibly we should say, replaces it) with four, more explicit cast operations:

static_cast
reinterpret_cast
const_cast
dynamic_cast

In C and C++ – and particularly in embedded systems – casting is a necessary evil; so much so that many programmers just accept it […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment