Question

I have this C++ class that one big complicated method compute that I would like to feed with a “compute kernel”, a method of the same class. I figure I would do something along the lines of

class test {
int classVar_ = 42;

int compute_add(int a, int b)
{
   compute(int a, int b, this->add_())
}

int compute_mult(int a, int b)
{
   compute(int a, int b, this->mult_())
}


int compute_(int a, int b, "pass in add or multiply as f()")
{
   int c=0;
   // Some complex loops {
   c += f(a,b)
   // }
   return c;
}

int add_(int a, int b){a+b+classVar_;}
int multiply_(int a, int b){a*b+classVar_;}
...

}

but I’m not sure how I would pass in add or multiply.
An alternative to this approach would be to pass in an ENUM of some sort to specify add() or multiply(), but I wanted to avoid a switch or if inside the loops.

What’s best practice here?

Answer 1

As you suspected, passing a member function pointer is acceptable practice.

If you need to know the syntax, it is:

int compute_(int a, int b, int (test::*f)(int,int))
{
   int c=0;
   // Some complex loops {
   c += (this->*f)(a,b)
   // }
   return c;
}

Representing member functions using integers, and switching, introduces programmer overhead to keep things up to date when the list of available operations changes. So you don’t want that unless there’s some important reason in a particular case.

One alternative is to make compute even more general — instead of taking a member function, write a function template that takes any callable type:

template <typename BinaryFunction>
int compute_(int a, int b, BinaryFunction f) {
    // body as before but `f(a,b)` instead of `(this->*f)(a,b)`
}

This more general template is great if someone wants to use it with some operator of their own invention, that isn’t a member function of test. It’s more difficult to use in the case of the member function, though, because someone needs to capture this. There are a few ways to do that — a C++11 lambda, boost::bind, or writing out a functor longhand. For example:

template <typename BinaryFunction>
int compute_(int a, int b, BinaryFunction f) {
    // body as before with `f(a,b)`
}

int compute_(int a, int b, int (test::*f)(int,int))
{
    return compute_(a, b, bind_this(f, this));
}

Defining bind_this is a bit of a pain: it’s like std::bind1st except that we’d like to work with a 3-arg functor whereas bind1st only takes a binary functor. boost::bind, and std::bind in C++11, are more flexible, and will handle the extra arguments. The following will do for this case, but doesn’t work in general to bind 2-arg member functions:

struct bind_this {
    int (test::*f)(int,int);
    test *t;
    int operator(int a, int b) const {
        return (t->*f)(a,b);
    }
    bind_this(int (test::*f)(int,int), test *t) : f(f), t(t) {}
};

In C++11 you can just use a lambda:

int compute_(int a, int b, int (test::*f)(int,int))
{
    return compute_(a, b, [=](int c, int d){ return (this->*f)(c,d) });
}