C++11 Enum Classes

With the release of the C++11 standard, C++ finally obtained its own enum type declarations. Dubbed “enum classes”, these new enums type define a namespace for the discrete values they contain. This sets them apart from classic C-style enums, which define their values in the enclosing scope. Enum classes can also be forward declared, helping improve compilation times by reducing transitive header inclusion.

C-style enums

So, what was the problem with C-style enums? -Consider this classic C enum defined at file scope:

enum ProjectionType
{
    PERSPECTIVE,
    ORTHOGONAL
};

Constants PERSPECTIVE and ORTHOGONAL are defined in the global namespace, meaning that all references to these names will be considered a value belonging to this enum. Using general names will surely lead to chaos, as two enums defined in different headers can easily cause type ambiguities when pulling both headers together in a compilation unit.

A solution to this problem in a language that does not have namespaces, like C, is to prefix each constant with something that identifies the type, as to prevent possible name clashes.

This means our constants would become PROJECTION_TYPE_PERSPECTIVE and PROJECTION_TYPE_ORTHOGONAL. Needless to say, all caps might not be ideal from a code readabilty standpoint, as they can easily make a modern C++ codebase look like an old C-style macro-plagued program.

The pre-2011 C++ approach

In C++, we do have namespaces, so we can wrap our enums in namespace declarations to help organize our constants:

namespace ProjectionType
{
    enum Enum
    {
        Perspective,
        Orthogonal
    };
}

Now, this is better. With this small change, our constants can be referenced as: ProjectionType::Perspective and ProjectionType::Orthogonal. The problem here is the fact that doing this every time for every enum can get a little tedious. Furthermore, our datatype is now called ProjectionType::Enum, which is not that pretty. Can we do better?

The C++11 solution

The ISO Committee decided to take this problem on by introducing the new concept of “enum classes”. Enum classes are just like C-style enums, with the advantage that they define a containing namespace (of the same name of the enum type) for the constants they declare.

enum class ProjectionType
{
    Perspective,
    Orthogonal
};

Notice we declare an enum class by adding the class keyword right after the enum keyword. This statement, which would cause a syntax error in the C++98 standard, is how we declare enum classes in C++11. It must be accepted by all conforming compilers.

Using this declaration, our constants can now be accessed as ProjectionType::Perspective and ProjectionType::Orthogonal, with the added advantage that our type is called ProjectionType.

C-style enums vs enum classes

Because C++ is a superset of C, we still have access to C-style enums in C++11-conforming compilers. You should, however, favor enum classes over C-style enums for all source files that are C++ code.