How to have “constexpr and runtime” alias

Question

Constexpr can be awsome and useful for compilation optimisation. For example...

strlen(char*)

Can be precompiled using....

Answer 1

I don't know any generic way, but I know two specific cases where it is possible.

Specific case of some compilers

Also gcc, and clang which copies all features of gcc, have a built-in function __builtin_constant_p. I am not sure whether gcc will correctly see argument to inline function as constant, but I fear you'd have to use it from a macro:

#define strlen_smart(s) \
    (__builtin_constant_p(s) && __builtin_constant_p(*s) ? \
        strlen_constexpr(s) : \
        strlen(s))

Might be of use. Note that I am testing both s and *s for constexpr, because pointer to static buffer is a compile time constant while it's length is not.

Bonus: Specific case of literals (not an actual answer)

For the specific cast of strlen you can use the fact that string literals are not of type const char * but of type const char[N] that implicitly converts to const char *. But it also converts to const char (&)[N] as well while const char * does not.

So you can define:

template <size_t N>
constexpr size_t strlen_smart(const char (&array)[N])

(plus obviously strlen_smart on const char * forwards to strlen)

I've sometimes used function with this type of argument even in C++98 with definition corresponding to (I didn't try to overload strlen itself, but the overloads were so I could avoid calling it):

template <size_t N>
size_t strlen_smart(const char (&)[N]) { return N - 1; }

This has the problem that for

char buffer[10] = { 0 };

strlen_smart(buffer);

should say 0, but that optimized variant just says 9. The functions don't make sense to be called on buffers like that so I didn't care.