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"Introduction" I'm relatively new to C++. I went through all the basic stuff and managed to build 2-3 simple interpreters for my programming languages. The first thing that gave and still gives me a headache: Implementing the type system of my language in C++ Think of that: Ruby, Python, PHP and Co. have a lot of built-in types which obviously are implemented in C. So what I first tried was to make it possible to give a value in my language three possible types: Int, String and Nil. I came up with this: enum ValueType { Int, String, Nil }; class Value { public: ValueType type; int intVal; string stringVal; }; Yeah, wow, I know. It was extremely slow to pass this class around as the string allocator had to be called all the time. Next time I've tried something similar to this: enum ValueType { Int, String, Nil }; extern string stringTable[255]; class Value { public: ValueType type; int index; }; I would store all strings in stringTable and write their position to index . If the type of Value was Int , I just stored the integer in index , it wouldn't make sense at all using an int index to access another int, or? Anyways, the above gave me a headache too. After some time, accessing the string from the table here, referencing it there and copying it over there grew over my head - I lost control. I had to put the interpreter draft down. Now: Okay, so C and C++ are statically typed. How do the main implementations of the languages mentioned above handle the different types in their programs (fixnums, bignums, nums, strings, arrays, resources,...)? What should I do to get maximum speed with many different available types? How do the solutions compare to my simplified versions above

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