riscv-isa-sim | Spike , a RISC-V ISA Simulator

I'm dealing with the following hard-to-debug code in a C++ program. I'm very new to C++, but I thought this might be a good candidate for conversion to a template. However, I'm having a hard time understanding what that would look like and how the new functions would be called. Would I still have multiple load_func functions, that would then just call the template function with an explicit type specified? Or could all 8 of these functions be replaced with a single function template? Which approach would be better? I believe that the first approach would require the least modification to other files, while the second would require that I update all calls to these functions to specify the type explicitly.