What are C++ functors and their uses?

Question

I keep hearing a lot about functors in C++. Can someone give me an overview as to what they are and in what cases they would be useful?

Answer 1

Functors are used in gtkmm to connect some GUI button to an actual C++ function or method.

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If you use the pthread library to make your app multithreaded, Functors can help you.
To start a thread, one of the arguments of the pthread_create(..) is the function pointer to be executed on his own thread.
But there's one inconvenience. This pointer can't be a pointer to a method, unless it's a static method, or unless you specify it's class, like class::method. And another thing, the interface of your method can only be:

void* method(void* something)

So you can't run (in a simple obvious way), methods from your class in a thread without doing something extra.

A very good way of dealing with threads in C++, is creating your own Thread class. If you wanted to run methods from MyClass class, what I did was, transform those methods into Functor derived classes.

Also, the Thread class has this method: static void* startThread(void* arg)
A pointer to this method will be used as an argument to call pthread_create(..). And what startThread(..) should receive in arg is a void* casted reference to an instance in heap of any Functor derived class, which will be casted back to Functor* when executed, and then called it's run() method.