Runtime support for extended types in C++

Abstract

The Taligent frameworks rely on an extended type system that gives the ability to polymorphically copy, create, and stream objects. The Taligent system provides a platform independent interface to obtain these services. We describe our experiences in porting the extended type services to a platform that does not currently have runtime type identification (RTTI) services in its C++ compiler. We provide some usage statistics to suggest that the extended type services are heavily used in a common operation.