Run-Time Checking of a Cast from a void*

Question

Say that I have a void* containing a pointer to an unknown class. I want to use dynamic_cast to do run-time checking on the type of cl

Answer 1

As I understand it you want a polymorphic object but no common base class.

There is already a fairly standard idiom for this - it's called boost::any.

A boost::any carries your object plus some type information. The interface allows you to query the type and to attempt to cast the any to the type you're looking for.

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_59_0/doc/html/any.html