A static cast will carry out pointer adjustment when traversing an
inheritance graph to account for multiple inheritance or a vtable. It
is reinterpret cast which will not.
Indeed, thanks. I was only half-thinking at the time, and decided to err on the side of caution. :)
I am one of the seemingly unpopular people who think it's perfectly fine to static_cast if you know the conversion will always be valid - i.e. so long as the program is not already in the process of crashing or failing asserts, which obviously should not be treated as reachable in released builds.
I often wish the stdlib had an asserted_static_cast<T>(arg) as this is a pattern I use often:
assert( dynamic_cast<T>(arg) );
auto& ref = *static_cast<T>(arg);
// Use ref
and I've not yet gotten around to creating my own little header to reduce the verbosity of this.
