Back in mid-August, Microsoft released the 2nd preview of Visual Studio 2019 16.3. This is the first version of Visual Studio to support concepts from C++20 both in the compiler and the standard library (header <concepts>) without the changes made at the ISO C++ standards meeting in Cologne. These changes are available when you compile with the /std:c++latest switch.
Concepts allow performing compile-time validation of template arguments and function dispatch based on properties of types. Concepts are very useful in libraries where they can be used to impose compile-time checks on the template arguments of functions or types. For instance, a generic algorithm for sorting a container would require the container type to be sortable for the program to even compile.
In this article, I will show an example with a concept that verifies that a type T can be converted to a std::string via a to_string() function, that is either a member of the class or a free function.