Implementing a symbol tables to store values for different types C++

Question

I'm implementing a compiler in C++ and am at the AST stage. I now need to add in the symbol_entry, a value for that varible (it already has type). But how do I keep values of different sizes in an attributes of the class when I don't know the type. My current idea is to declare an attribute "val_pointer" of type void* in the symbol_entry, and cast for example from int* to void* and back. My understanding is that this can be done because pointers are all of the same size. Will this work? And also, is this way of allocating an int* separately each time efficient? I think that it would be better if I store create these int* from a contiguous block of memory, but I want to save space too.

Answer 1

One solution is to use tagged unions. For example:

enum Type
{
    tInt,
    tDouble
};

struct Data
{
    Type    type;
    union
    {
        int Int;    // only valid when type is tInt
        double Double;  // only valid when type is tDouble
    } as;
};

Note that this isn't the best solution available in C++. You may want to look into std::variant, which has some advantages when compared to a raw tagged union, see Where to use std::variant over union?.

Another approach might be to have a class hierarchy, where each of your data types inherits from a basic Object type.