C++ “Dynamic” function pointers for C callback functions

Question

I have an API for managing a camera configuration. There are 344 individual options to manage. When a certain value changes the API calls a callback function to notify the p

Answer 1

You can generate closures dynamically using libffi. These are regular function pointers that can retain one pointer to user data, in this case the callback number.

#include 
#include 
#include "ffi.h"

using namespace std;
void the_callback(size_t num, void* arg) {
    cout << "This is callback #" << num << " with argument " << hex << arg << endl;
}

void generic_cb(ffi_cif *cif, void *ret, void **args, void *user_data) {
    the_callback((size_t) user_data, *(void **)args[0]);
}

typedef void (*Callback)(void*);

ffi_cif callback_cif;
int main() {
    ffi_type *argtypes[] = { &ffi_type_pointer };
    ffi_status st = ffi_prep_cif(&callback_cif, FFI_DEFAULT_ABI, 1, &ffi_type_void, argtypes);

    std::vector callbacks;
    for (size_t i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        void *cb;
        ffi_closure *writable = (ffi_closure*)ffi_closure_alloc(sizeof(ffi_closure), &cb);
        st = ffi_prep_closure_loc(writable, &callback_cif, generic_cb, (void*)i, cb);
        callbacks.push_back((Callback)cb);
    }

    callbacks[13]((void*)0xabcdef);
    callbacks[87]((void*)0x1234);
}

This produces the following output:

This is callback #13 with argument 0xabcdef
This is callback #57 with argument 0x1234