Boost.Function has several advantages over function pointers, namely:
And, of course, function pointers have several advantages over Boost.Function:
Function object wrappers will be the size of a struct containing a member function pointer and two data pointers. The actual size can vary significantly depending on the underlying platform; on 32-bit Mac OS X with GCC, this amounts to 16 bytes, while it is 32 bytes Windows with Visual C++. Additionally, the function object target may be allocated on the heap, if it cannot be placed into the small-object buffer in the Copying function object wrappers may require allocating memory for a copy of the function object target. The default allocator may be replaced with a faster custom allocator or one may choose to allow the function object wrappers to only store function object targets by reference (using With a properly inlining compiler, an invocation of a function object requires one call through a function pointer. If the call is to a free function pointer, an additional call must be made to that function pointer (unless the compiler has very powerful interprocedural analysis). The use of virtual functions tends to cause 'code bloat' on many compilers. When a class contains a virtual function, it is necessary to emit an additional function that classifies the type of the object. It has been our experience that these auxiliary functions increase the size of the executable significantly when many In Boost.Function, an alternative but equivalent approach was taken using free functions instead of virtual functions. The Boost.Function object essentially holds two pointers to make a valid target call: a void pointer to the function object it contains and a void pointer to an "invoker" that can call the function object, given the function pointer. This invoker function performs the argument and return value conversions Boost.Function provides. A third pointer points to a free function called the "manager", which handles the cloning and destruction of function objects. The scheme is typesafe because the only functions that actually handle the function object, the invoker and the manager, are instantiated given the type of the function object, so they can safely cast the incoming void pointer (the function object pointer) to the appropriate type. Many people were involved in the construction of this library. William Kempf, Jesse Jones and Karl Nelson were all extremely helpful in isolating an interface and scope for the library. John Maddock managed the formal review, and many reviewers gave excellent comments on interface, implementation, and documentation. Peter Dimov led us to the function declarator-based syntax.
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