sans the implementation of the index lookup table(s)
The algorithm is KISS, a variant of insertion sort, i.e.
worst time quadratic, but known to perform well on small data sets.
The mere generation of the diff description is O(n log n), since
we do not verify that we can "find" out of order elements. We leave
this to the consumer of the diff, which at this point has to scan
into the rest of the data sequence (leading to quadratic complexity)
finally....
The problem is that the C++ "dependent types" defeat the typical
DSL usage, where you define some helper function in a generic
language setup class and mix this language in as superclass.
This is, C++ requires us to refer explicitly to any dependent type,
since, due to possible template specialisations, the parser
can't know if a given symbol is a inherited type or a field.
As a solution, we place the token constructor functors into a
static struct "token", which allows to write e.g. token.insert(xyz)
As decided in beb57cde
this changeset switches our basic list diff language to work
in the style of an insertion sort. Rather than 'pushing back'
out-of-order elements, we scan and bring forward missing elements.
Later, when passing the original location of the elements
fetched this way, a 'skip' verb will help to clean up
possible leftowers, so implementation is possible
(and indeed acomplished) without shifting any other elements.
and this adds a twist: conceptually, we identify the token
with the abstract handler function it represents. But C++
does not allow us to compare member pointers to virtual functions,
for good reason: even two pointers with the "same offset" into
the VTable might end up referring to different implementations,
when bound to instances of different subclasses. This is what
polymorphism is all about.
At this point it seems reasonably, albeit a bit uggly, to use the
diagnostic ID as placeholder instead, and just compare these IDs
instead. We assume that in practice tokens will be defined through
the provided helper macro, which ensures unique identifiers.
basically just a function to pick up the container and element type automatically.
The actual implementation is delegated to the exisiting lib::iter_stl::IterSnapshot
Heureka! found out that the C++ standard library exposes a
cross vendor C++ ABI, which amongst others allows to show
object code names and type-IDs in the language-level, human
readable unmangeld form.
Of course, actual application code should not rely on such a
internal representation, yet it is of tremendous help when
writing and debugging unit tests.
Signed-off-by: Ichthyostega <prg@ichthyostega.de>
Actually I arried at the conclusion, that the *receiving* of
a diff representation is actually a typical double-dispatch situation.
This leads to the attempt to come up with a specialised visitor
as standard pattern to handle and apply a diff. Obviously,
we do not want the classical GoF-Visitor, but (yes, we had
that discussion allready) -- well in terms of runtime cost,
we have to deal with at least two indirections anyway;
so now I'm exploring the idea to implement one of these
indirections through a functor object, which at the same time
acts as "Tag" in the diff representation language (instead
of using an enum as tag)
Uniform sequence at start of source files
- copyright claim
- license
- file comment
- header guard
- lumiera includes
- library / system includes
Lumiera uses Brittish spelling. Add an according note to the styleguide.
initial considerations; there is a concurrency problem, since
all of session handling within Proc is deliberately not threadsafe.
Thus the decision is to make this the gui::model::SessionFacade's responsibility
The actual problem is not resolved; the pluginloader
should detect the duplicate and not add the handle
to the database initially. Or it should add it
as "duplicate" or "alternate implementation"
Which probably means we need to coder some additional
corner cases. But certainly not now, we have other
more important stuff to do first... we've already
lost the battle against Duke Nukem Forever :-P
Mark parts of the timeline state handling which will certainly
not be retained: any part where the GUI widgets "hold" some kind
of model. GUI widgets shall be *mapped upon* a model representation
and *wired* with callbacks.
Especially I am suspicious when GUI presentation code "reaches into"
any kind of model data structure to find out something. It should
be the other way round (dont call us, we call you)
actually we should make our timeline a real custom widget,
and do it according to the letter. I.e. really implement
all those callbacks which are recommended, but no other
callbacks.
This has the additional benefit of being able to retrieve
the drawing style in the official way, and define our own
CSS classes, which can be styled by the user in a systematic way.
This is not really a solution, but kind of narrowes down the problem.
Our GUI uses an obsolete C-ish approach at releasing resources at
several points. This is probably a left-over from earlier days.
Especially since we started out with libGDL without C++ wrappers.
And at that time, we didn't use smart-pointers, as we should do,
but we tried to do things manually, which is an approach which never
works in an event driven and condition based environment. Goto fail.
Here I just commented out the manual clean-up code from several dtors.
The real solution would be not to allocate these resources through
the raw C calls at first place, but rather use the mm-wrappers
and leave it to them to unwind at the right moment.
TODO:
- scan the GUI code for *every* instance where we still muck around with gobjects
and either replace that by a mm-wrapper, or wrap it in a smart handle.
- make sure that *all* dtors are either empty, or really airtight and EX_FREE
doh...
this happens when you draft some quite intricate logic and then
get sidelined with other tasks for several years. Mind me, I didn't
even recall that I had treated this whole issue and created
a clean-up thread.
A full fledged implementation would have a real lifecycle and
thus detect the re-entrance; but since none of the components
to be managed by the OutputDirector is even remotely planned
or even coded, the functions were just drafted as stubs.
Which caused us happily to create yet another clean-up thread
whenever the subsystem-runner signalled "please shut down".
Our GUI shutdown logic looks rather confused. Why the hell do
some widgets "unregister" themselves in a dtor. This should never
be necessary. Maybe it's a leftover from C-style programming
and obsolete now, after the switch to GDLmm
the problem seems to be the interplay with the installed user
theme; what looks well with one theme is messed up with another
one, quite insidious.
Attempt to settle down on a set of default definitions
for borders and element background colors, which make the
Lumiera Gui "dark" but still respect the user's theme
for geometry and widget style
verified: basically works
todo: better handling of parse errors.
Currently this is treated as an unexpected exception and just
terminates the whole application, without any suitable diagnostics.
This makes working on the stylesheet somewhat brittle. GTK-3 actually
offers a signal to be invoked in case of CSS parsing errors
(see #953)
Comment out the active part of the GdkDisplayer implementation,
but retain the class, to make compilation pass.
With the Switch to GTK-3, only Cairo drawing is supported.
We need a new solution for video display...
Lots off commented out blocks of code
but most issues are related to simple function name changes,
set/get_flags calls, anything that has to do with a Gtk::Style...
Plan of attack from here is to go one-by one of each commented-out or code and update to gtk3 specs.
trying to track down where these messages
GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion G_IS_OBJECT (object) failed
are coming from. These appear when iconifying panels.
as always, it turned out that the alledged "compiler bug"
rather was my own sloppyness: I forgot properly to undo a change
I made while fighting with compilation problems: the wrapper in
the factory didn't use std::forward, resulting in a plain flat
slicing copy. This, rightfully, triggered the assertion in the
session query resolver (since a sliced Goal can not be dynamic cast
to a specific Query subclass).
TODO: the toolfactory needs a redesign anyway,
this was just placeholder code added in a very early
state of the Lumiera project. We have way better memory
managing facilities at hand now
the use of a custom finisihing functor, which is applied
to any generated product. This can be used for registration,
memory management or similar framework aspects
Implement the first simple usage scenario for the
unified MultiFact template, using variadic templates.
NOTE:
- the obvious solution based on std::forward
triggers strange behaviour in GCC-4.7
- the inline lambda in the test case traps the
CLang-3.0 parster with a segfault. Horay!
...but the whole design looks still overengineered. See #388
- should get rid of the explicit specialisation
- always use a function signature and thus have arguments?
- why inheriting from the wrapper?
still puzzled why this instantiation of MultiFact fails to compile with GCC 4.8
so I'm bound to understand why the types involved
need indeed to be are structured the way they are right now.
previous versions used to resolve this ambiguity in favour of a ctor call,
but now the compiler treats such constructs as function definition;
this is reasonable, since C++11 introduced the notion of a "generalised
initialisation", which is always written as a (possibly empty) list
in braces.
In these specific cases here, we just omit the empty parens
Since we have now a generic bridge to supply std::hash functions based on
an exisiting boost::hash function, we removed the explicit std::hash
specialisation for "Placement-ID".
This caused the PlacementIndex implementation to fail at compilation
with a quite obscure error, which in fact seems to be caused by the
absence of any specific specialisation. The symptom is that a iterator
range could not be assigned to the predefined iterator type of
std::unordered_multimap, due to a mismatch in the embedded traits type
__umap_traits<__cache_default<_Key, _Hash>::value>>
While I didn't track down that problem entirely, to verify my hypothesis,
the problem can be avoided by using the default -- which is now to
pick up an existing boost::hash function for this type and use this
to generate the std::hash function.
right now we have to defeat an unfortunate static assertion in
the standard library, which is expected to go away in the future.
We use a hack to hijack the problematic definition with the preprocessor,
which requires our header to be first.
NOTE: this header contains a potentially dangerous, temporary workaround
to defeat the static assertion in the default implementation of std::hash,
as shipped with GCC 4.7.x
This assertion turns out to be detrimental all kinds of metaprogramming
based solutions, since it defeats SFINAE. It is expected to be removed
in GCC 4.8
the rules are:
- our own headers go before any library headers
- all headers need to be spelled relative to include root
- ensure that gtk is always included via gui/gtk-base.hpp
c++11 uses another hashtable implementation.
This uncovered some poorly written tests, which relied on
objects being returned in a specific order. As far as poissible,
we're using generic query functions now to get our test objects.
But these tests still rely on a specifically crafted test index content,
which as such is acceptable IMHO. The only remaining problem is
that we check the order of generated output in some tests, and this
order is still implementation dependent.
a real fix would be to rewrite the test to collect the retrieved
values and do a structural verification of the results. This
would mean to write a lot of code for such a marginal topic,
which was implemented just for sake of completenes anyway.
Hopefully my lack of "motivation" doesn't backfire eventually ;-)
Conversion means automatic conversion. In our case,
what we need ist the ability to *construct* a bool from
our (function) object -- while functors aren't automatically
convertible to bool. Thus we use one of the new predicates
from <type_traits>
...uncovered by switching to c++11
When invoking an individual test, we used to erase
the 0-th cmdline argument, which happens to be allways
the name of the test being invoked. Yet none of our
tests actually complied to that contract. Rather,
all tests taking arguments access them by 1-based
argument index. Previously, the argument values just
happened to be still in memory at the original location
after erasing the 0st element.
"Fixed" that by changing the contract. Now, the 0th argument
remains in place, but when there are no additional arguments,
the whole cmdline is cleared.
This is messy, but the test runer needs to be rewritten
entirely, the whole API is clumsy and dangerous. Ticket #289
* use a development snapshot of lib SigC including the recent C++11 adaptations
* never include whole namespaces. Here we got a clash between std::bind and sigc::bind
* use lambdas
* to make the binding code more readable
* to take the nested invocations apart, which resolves the return type ambiguity
In the November developer meeting, Christian and I agreed that
it's best to remove that offending LUID specifications altogether.
Those embedded LUIDs where one of the issues blocking the transition to C++11
This is a partial and preliminary fix; we had an occasional
numeric overflow on 32bit platforms in some tests.
The complete fix will be to introduce a typedef and then
rework the relevant APIs (which are preliminary anyway,
thus no urge right now)
our front-end for boost::format, the class lib::_Fmt
was lacking an reliable specialisation for long and ulong.
This is due to the notorious problem of these types being
of platform dependant size. As a fix, we're speclialising
explicitly for int16_t, int32_t and int64_t and avoid the
common names 'short', 'int' and 'long' alltogether.
And especially for non-64bit-platform (NONPORTABLE)
we add an explicit specialisation for long
The recommendation is to use the link flag --no-undefined
and to fed *all* dependencies to the respective link step.
This changeset enables this strict linking of dependencies.
It turned out that our dependencies were already sane
(with the sole exception of a direct dependency to X-Lib
in the XV viewer widget)
- upgrade the configuration to a current version
- provide a frontpage with cross-links to other documentation
- define a set of modules; relevant classes and files can be
added to these, to create a exploration path for new readers
- fix a lot of errors in documentation comments
- use a custom configuration for the documentation pages
- tweak the navigation, the sections and further arrangements
to make them stand out more prominently, some entity comments
where started with a line of starts. Unfortunately, doxygen
(and javadoc) only recogise comments which are started exactly
with /**
This caused quite some comments to be ignored by doxygen.
Credits to Hendrik Boom for spotting this problem!
A workaround is to end the line of stars with *//**
When a ctor throws, the dtors of sub-objects have already been
invoked. The object itself never existed, strictly speaking,
and thus the dtor must not be invoked. Usually the runtime system
handles matters automatically this way, but since we're doing
here placement new into an array, we're responsible ourselves
This error was uncovered by compiling with Clang.
GCC automatically neutralised this erroneous dtor invocation.
This removes the central clean-up registry;
Instead, now the InstanceHolder manages the lifecycle of
the service instances placed into static memory; the net effect
is that DependencyFactory and instances are created and destroyed
together, locally for each usage scope
We don't need this ability and it pushes us into using a
central registry. This solution turned out to be problematic
when loading dynamic libraries (plug-ins).
this check may look weird, but in fact a similar check in the
old version of the singleton factory helped us spot a problem
with Clang, most likely but of the compiler or runtime system
Clang doesn't allow to declare a private nested class as friend.
This is unfortunate, but likely correct to the letter of the standard.
As a workaround, now we're creating the instances within a static
function of DependencyFactory -- in the end this improves readability
A second issue fixed with this changeset is the scope of the
marker function. Clang is right, this isn't ADL, thus an inline
friend definition is simply not visible outside the class.
lib::Depend<TY> works as drop-in replacement for lib::Singleton<TY>
This changeset removes the convoluted special cases like
SingletonSub and MockInjector.
explanation: we use pthread_once to define a mutex type descriptor,
used to define some of our mutexes as recursive mutexes. Now,
pthread_once relies on a counter stored in a given location;
we used a non-exported global var for this counter.
Unfortunately this ties the mutex initialisation to the static
initialisation of the compilation unit holding this counter variable.
Theoretically it would be possible (we never observed such an incident)
that, during static initialisation, a singleton was brought up,
which requires a class-scoped lock, implemented as recursive mutex.
And it would be possible for this singleton locking to happen prior
to initialisation of the mentioned counter variable.
As a fix, I've moved the counter varialbe into a function scoped
static variable, since that is guaranteed by the C++ runtime system
to be initialised at first usage of the function, irrespective of the
initialisation order of the enclosing compilation units
clang-3.2 requires a clarification here (while previous versions
of clang and GCC automatically resolved the ambiguity by assuming
use of a nested, dependent template).
Clang is more insistent when it comes to enforcing 'protected' visibility.
Since in this case the basic design can be considered sane and optimal, the
only (and obvious) solution is to nest the PIMPL into a default base class
for implementation; this mirrors the structure of the interface.
Compilation with Clang 3.0 (which is available in Debian/stable) fails,
mostly due to some scoping and naming inconsistencies which weren't detected
by GCC. At some instances, Clang seems to have problems to figure out a
perfectly valid type definition; these can be resolved by more explicit
typing (which is preferrable anyway)
by providing a custom copy function one can adjust otherwise non-copyable
elements. This should be used cautionary because dereferencing elements may
poison the cache and thus have some considerable performance impact
(profile this)
using our util::_Fmt front-end helps to reduce the code size,
since all usages rely on a single inclusion of boost::format
including boost::format via header can cause quite some code bloat
NOTE: partial solution, still some further includes to reorganise
this draft fills in the structure how to get from an invocation
of the engine service to the starting of actual CalcStream instances.
Basically the EngineService implementation is repsonsile to
instruct the Segmentation to provide a suitable Dispatcher.
This is necessary since the implementation of the job functions
calls through the VTable of the interface JobClosure. Thus this
interface (and the VTable definition) needs to reside within
some compilation unit linked together with the basic job class.
TODO: move class Job entirely into the Backend
now builds for me on Debian-7 Wheezy 64bit
unqualified member functions in dependent base classes not found anymore.
Need to qualify either the class or the instance.
...for the very specific situation when we want
to explore an existing data structure, and the
exploration assumes value semantics.
The workaround then is to use pointers as values.
...attempt to build it based on the monadic iterator primitives.
Only problem is: need to find out relation between nodes
after the fact. In the real usage situation, this
is not a problem, since we have a state object
there, which can track the relation as it is established
basically I've changed my mind to prefer an
infinite JobPlanningSequence, which is just
evaluated partially. This removes the need to
embody the logic of planning chunk generation,
which really is a different concern.
decision: the base for any deadline calculations
is the expected real time corresponding to the grid origin.
This value is contained in the Timings record.
this clarifies the relation of TimeAnchor and Timings,
the latter act as a general spec and abstracted grid,
while the latter actually performs the conversion and
deadline checking
Rationale: this is the *support* Library.
The real "Lumiera-Library" does not exist yet.
liblumiera.so will be the *interface* every external
module / plug-in uses to get Lumiera functionality.
Especially the work on Library dependency clean-up
made outright clear, that this interface library
needs to be a separate piece of software, which is
carefully crafted, and more-or-less depends on the
whole application.
the buildsystem will now pick up and link
all test cases according to the layer, e.g.
backend tests will automatically be linked
against the backend + library solely.
tests used to be defined ad hoc and test definitions
are scattered confusingly over various directories.
Now built some simple rules into the buildsystem
to allow organising the tests into layers and
linking them accordingly.
Note: this switches to building shared objects
for the test classes too, which effectively speeds up
both re-building and re-running of test cases
Our libraries constitute a clear dependency hierarchy,
we do not want circular dependencies. Declaring these
dependencies while creating the shared libraries would
allow strict checking by the linker; but unfortunately
this also creates transitive depdendencies stored as
DT_NEEDED tags.
While basically this would be just fine, the resolution of $ORIGIN
on gets confused in case of transitively defined library dependencies
over multiple hops, especially in case when actually no symbol of this
transitive dependency is used. Since these newer systems set the
--as-needed switch for linking by default, these unnecessary
DT_NEEDED entries will be purged from the executable, but of course
not from the shared library causing the transitive dependencies.
As a consequence, when loading the executable, the $ORIGIN resolution
mechanism doesn't act on the dependencies recorded in the library,
causing the shared loader to abort with an "unresolved dependency"
So the resolution for these problems is not to use transitive
dependencies on libraries intended to be found via $ORIGIN
This is kind of a workaround to avoid having to maintain two variants.
Explanation: between Boost 1.42 and 1.52 there was the transition to a
reworked version of the filesystem library, itroducing some breaking changes
The new version distinguishes much clearer between the native and the
generic representation of paths -- which becomes relevant when porting
to non-POXIX operating systems.
Actually the intention was to use the generic path representation in all
configuration; currently this distinction is moot, since we're caring
only for POSIX systems.
So the workaround is to use the fsys::path::string() function, which
is available in both versions, but changed meaning to yield the native
string. Later, when able to deprecate older Boost versions, we should
switch to generic_string()
Note: an alternative solution was found by Mike Fisher in 3b39f35
using the compiletime define BOOST_FILESYSTEM_VERSION=2
See also ticket #896
now this library doesn't refer to any symbols from
Proc-Layer anymore. Resolving these problems
highlighted IMHO a serious shortcomming of our
interface system, which hinders the building
of abstractions at interface level
there is now a mechanism to allow sprcialised queries
to generate this syntactic representation only on demand
The actual concrete representation e.g. for scope queries
still remains TODO, but this won't really change
until we target the integration of a real resoloution engine
while refactoring, I thought it might be a good idea
only to use Query objects. But in this special case,
most often you'd just want to pass in a simple query
with a literal query string. So this convenience shortcut
indeed makes sense.
...to extract the syntetic ordering from
DefsRegistry and make that a responsibility
of the (internal) syntactic representation
of the query.
doesn't pass the compiler yet
effectively this joins the two existing lines
of "Query" classes into one systematic representation
Next step would be to move all mutation operations
over to the Query::Builder
time handling is part of the library, while this
convenience shortcut relies on the Advice system,
which resides in the application lib.
To allow this kind of symbolic acces to a grid
entity defined "elesewhere", client code needs
to be linked against liblumieracore.so
especially this allows to use the Advice system
or the query resolvers from within library facilities
to refer to other implementation level services by name
the rules-based configuration and query system
will be located within the core application,
while the concrete implementation facilities
are expected to reside within the session or
maybe also the GUI.
This is kind of a 'rochade' refactoring to resolve
circular library dependencies and confine the parts
dependant on the session and MObjects to the Proc-Layer
And while we're in the middle of chainsaw surgery,
we'll concentrate further query-based facilities
alongside the config-rules within the App core.
This template was a leftover from the early days
of Lumiera development and doesn't provide any
substantial value as an abstraction.
For the more intricate cases, we're using the
lib::MultiFact template, which allows to install
several "fabrication" functions at runtime
the solution is to introduce a superinterface
and let Dispatcher augment that with the specific parts.
This way, the Job planning only has to rely on the
rather generic stuff (TimeAnchor, FrameCoord)
NOTE: this commit makes the whole JobPlanning machinery
compilable for the first time!
..the Idea is to rely on some kind of service,
to break the cyclic dependency with the Dispatcher.
But I seem unable to find a natural location or
concept to house that service.
basically we had two lines of doubly nested capsules, due to
using the IterAdaptor template. Actually, the evaluation stack
within JobTicket can be considered an implementation detail and
thus doesn't require an iterator interface; the intention is to
use this through JobPlanning solely.
Thus this reworking removes the special iterator within JobTicket,
but retains the idea of exposing the "current" JobTicket through
a smart pointer or operator->()
work done during the FrOSCon travel
especially the exploration stack is pushed down
first successful definition of all the JobPlanning classes
just the framework of classes necessary to pass the compiler;
all implementation is still stubbed
brainstorming how to implement the job planning stage
the idea is to built on top of the IterExplorer,
but have the "stack" of re-evaluation integrated
into a custom type, which exploits the static
node network structure to avoid heap allocations
solution idea: again use a builder function?
the template _Fun started as an internal helper
for function-closure, but seems to be of
general use. Thus move it into meta/function.hpp
(function-closure.hpp is heavyweight)
this enables expansion of a (functional) data structure
until exhaustion -- which is what we need to
build job functors by traversing and expanding
an arbitrarily nested job definition structure
the intention is to use this to simplify
generating render jobs based on the elaborated
dependency network of the render nodes. The key
challenge is to overcome the necessity to
store partially done evaluations as
continuation
the tricky part seems to be how to combine the
source iterators into a new monad instance, while
keeping this "Combinator" Strategy configurable
...just passes the compiler, while still lacking
even the generic implementation of joining
together the source iterators
The idea is to avoid building a data structure
for intermediary results, while still being able
to process a variably sized and arbitrary shaped
set of source data
without any trickery, we'll always get two indirections.
Thus, the decision is to turn the 2nd indirection
into a VTable call; this way, basically the JobClosure
also acts as job functor itself.
implemented as extension to the linear combinations.
I decided to use the same "always floor" rule
as employed for time quantisation. Moreover,
we don't support floating point, only rationals
funny enough this possible memory corruption
didn't happen in the unit test, because my
compiler optimised the additional int field
of class SubDummy, making it the same size
of the baseclass. Now matters should be safe.
this draft is based on
- Cehteh's draft for the scheduler
- my plannings about segmentation and JobTicket
it defines "Job" as a closure which can be invoked
from plain-C, using the information in the
job descriptor datastructure
also touches the question how to represent the job
descriptor datastructure. @Cehteh: I've just pasted
in your preliminary data struct definitinons
from the relevant mailing list discussions.
instead of (ab)using the Timings spect for a
runtime switch, better use the existing
MockInjector facility and thus turn the
mock engine mode into a global switch
I think it's smart to rather use ALSA directly instead of PortAudio.
ALSA is push AFAIK, and talking about it here at the hackspace, seems
like the better choice. It's a bit lower level, but anyway everything
speaks ALSA anyway. It's not like there's any reason to use PortAudio
at all. It's just an extra abstraction.
Coding for ALSA it'll also work with Pulseaudio and esd. Do people
really use other sound systems than Pulseaudio, esd or plain ALSA?
I can't think of it.
I really the idea about building a small tool first. I'll do that.
Also thought about making a small blikning cursor/text output, and
syncing a BEEP-sound to that, so that I can test around with throwing
in lots and lots of latency between "me" and the video, and try to
sync it anyway.
I should be able to read back from the sound card (or pulse audio
underneath, it will just work with alsa as the abstraction) how long
it takes for the bytes I'm pushing to reach the speakers, and do some
buffer tuning on that.
The goal is to make the build scrips more clear
at first sight. So move the main build targets
into a separate SConscript, to make them similar
to the tests, research and tools.
The final goal of this makeover is to reduce
the main SConstruct as much as possible
this turns out to be the typical usage scenario
for ScopedCollection: a manager object owning
the collection will populate it with specially
crafted components and invoke a member function
for creating the individual components.
This shortcut avoids using tr1::bind alltogether
some basic types are passed on directly;
for those, we use explicit specialisations
in the implementation file, and a traits template
to mark those cases in the header.
custom types with custom string conversion will
be converted to string; everything else
just becomes a type id
