Best alternative to Queue<T>

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

I made Queue. Queue was nice until I came across a reason to encapsulate a different type than Queue was written for.

I know that I can’t rewrite it as the generic Queue

What are some ways you guys work around this?

2

It really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re after type safety, you can create a queue wrapper class that takes a System.Type object as a parameter and validates calls to Enqueue. Then you’ll only need one class.

class MyQueue {
    private Queue queue = new Queue();
    private Type type;

    MyQueue(Type type) => this.type = type;

    public void Enqueue(object o) {
        if (o.GetType() != this.type) throw new ArgumentException("Wrong type");

        this.queue.Enqueue(o);
    }
}

If you want strongly typed methods, you’ll have to create a new queue per type (which is what generics does behind the scenes when it instantiates a type).

class MyQueue {
    private Queue queue = new Queue();

    public void Enqueue(int o) => this.queue.Enqueue(o);
    public int Dequeue() => (int)this.queue.Dequeue();
}
1 Like
3

Thank you for the examples.

I am not going after Type Safety. And I was hoping to avoid (explicitly) defining Strongly Typed methods.

My goal was to write less code :slight_smile:

And the second option seems pretty good in helping me there.