Question

I was playing with C++ lambdas and their implicit conversion to function pointers. My starting example was using them as callback for the ftw function. This works as expected.

#include <ftw.h>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    auto callback = [](const char *fpath, const struct stat *sb,
        int typeflag) -> int {
        cout << fpath << endl;
        return 0;
    };

    int ret = ftw("/etc", callback, 1);

    return ret;
}

After modifying it to use captures:

int main()
{

    vector<string> entries;

    auto callback = [&](const char *fpath, const struct stat *sb,
        int typeflag) -> int {
        entries.push_back(fpath);
        return 0;
    };

    int ret = ftw("/etc", callback, 1);

    for (auto entry : entries ) {
        cout << entry << endl;
    }

    return ret;
}

I got the compiler error:

error: cannot convert ‘main()::<lambda(const char*, const stat*, int)>’ to ‘__ftw_func_t {aka int (*)(const char*, const stat*, int)}’ for argument ‘2’ to ‘int ftw(const char*, __ftw_func_t, int)’

After some reading. I learned that lambdas using captures can’t be implicitly converted to function pointers.

Is there a workaround for this? Does the fact that they can’t be “implicitly” converted mean s that they can “explicitly” converted? (I tried casting, without success). What would be a clean way to modify the working example so that I could append the entries to some object using lambdas?.

Answer 1

Since capturing lambdas need to preserve a state, there isn’t really a simple “workaround”, since they are not just ordinary functions. The point about a function pointer is that it points to a single, global function, and this information has no room for a state.

The closest workaround (that essentially discards the statefulness) is to provide some type of global variable which is accessed from your lambda/function. For example, you could make a traditional functor object and give it a static member function which refers to some unique (global/static) instance.

But that’s sort of defeating the entire purpose of capturing lambdas.