Deconstructing function pointers in a C++ template

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Developer Blogs.

I always forget how to deconstruct a function pointer type in a C++ template, so I'm writing it down. We start by saying that FunctionTraits is a template class that takes a single type parameter, but don't actually provide any class definition yet. The class definition will come from the specializations. We then define a specialization that takes a function pointer, where R is the return type, and where Args... are the argument types. This specialization defines a bunch of stuff. This gets us started, but there are a bunch of weird things that cause this definition to fail. One is the case of a function with no parameters. In that case, the FirstArg and LastArg will not compile, since there are no arguments to be the first or last of. We'll need to specialize for that case. The specialization for the no-parameter case doesn't define NthArg, FirstArg or LastArg, since those things don't exist. We can factor the common pieces into a base class to avoid repeating ourselves quite so much. Unfortunately, this doesn't work because ArgCount is not not recognized as dependent names. We have to give the compiler a little help:¹ That looks pretty good. But we're not done yet, not by a longshot. Next time, we'll investigate one of the categories of function pointers that this template cannot recognize. ¹ For dependent names that represent members, you can use this-> to mark them as dependent names if you are using them in an instance member function. But for dependent names that are types, or for use where there is no this, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to identify them as dependent.