What Are C++ Functors and Their Uses

What are C++ functors and their uses?

A functor is pretty much just a class which defines the operator(). That lets you create objects which "look like" a function:

// this is a functor
struct add_x {
  add_x(int val) : x(val) {}  // Constructor
  int operator()(int y) const { return x + y; }

private:
  int x;
};

// Now you can use it like this:
add_x add42(42); // create an instance of the functor class
int i = add42(8); // and "call" it
assert(i == 50); // and it added 42 to its argument

std::vector<int> in; // assume this contains a bunch of values)
std::vector<int> out(in.size());
// Pass a functor to std::transform, which calls the functor on every element 
// in the input sequence, and stores the result to the output sequence
std::transform(in.begin(), in.end(), out.begin(), add_x(1)); 
assert(out[i] == in[i] + 1); // for all i

There are a couple of nice things about functors. One is that unlike regular functions, they can contain state. The above example creates a function which adds 42 to whatever you give it. But that value 42 is not hardcoded, it was specified as a constructor argument when we created our functor instance. I could create another adder, which added 27, just by calling the constructor with a different value. This makes them nicely customizable.

As the last lines show, you often pass functors as arguments to other functions such as std::transform or the other standard library algorithms. You could do the same with a regular function pointer except, as I said above, functors can be "customized" because they contain state, making them more flexible (If I wanted to use a function pointer, I'd have to write a function which added exactly 1 to its argument. The functor is general, and adds whatever you initialized it with), and they are also potentially more efficient. In the above example, the compiler knows exactly which function std::transform should call. It should call add_x::operator(). That means it can inline that function call. And that makes it just as efficient as if I had manually called the function on each value of the vector.

If I had passed a function pointer instead, the compiler couldn't immediately see which function it points to, so unless it performs some fairly complex global optimizations, it'd have to dereference the pointer at runtime, and then make the call.

Why use functors over functions?

At least four good reasons:

Separation of concerns

In your particular example, the functor-based approach has the advantage of separating the iteration logic from the average-calculation logic. So you can use your functor in other situations (think about all the other algorithms in the STL), and you can use other functors with for_each.

Parameterisation

You can parameterise a functor more easily. So for instance, you could have a CalculateAverageOfPowers functor that takes the average of the squares, or cubes, etc. of your data, which would be written thus:

class CalculateAverageOfPowers
{
public:
    CalculateAverageOfPowers(float p) : acc(0), n(0), p(p) {}
    void operator() (float x) { acc += pow(x, p); n++; }
    float getAverage() const { return acc / n; }
private:
    float acc;
    int   n;
    float p;
};

You could of course do the same thing with a traditional function, but then makes it difficult to use with function pointers, because it has a different prototype to CalculateAverage.

Statefulness

And as functors can be stateful, you could do something like this:

CalculateAverage avg;
avg = std::for_each(dataA.begin(), dataA.end(), avg);
avg = std::for_each(dataB.begin(), dataB.end(), avg);
avg = std::for_each(dataC.begin(), dataC.end(), avg);

to average across a number of different data-sets.

Note that almost all STL algorithms/containers that accept functors require them to be "pure" predicates, i.e. have no observable change in state over time. for_each is a special case in this regard (see e.g. Effective Standard C++ Library - for_each vs. transform).

Performance

Functors can often be inlined by the compiler (the STL is a bunch of templates, after all). Whilst the same is theoretically true of functions, compilers typically won't inline through a function pointer. The canonical example is to compare std::sort vs qsort; the STL version is often 5-10x faster, assuming the comparison predicate itself is simple.

Summary

Of course, it's possible to emulate the first three with traditional functions and pointers, but it becomes a great deal simpler with functors.

C++ functors behavior

One part of this is that cmp2_item is not a type, its an instance of the type cmp2. So you can't pass that as a class type. You might be able to do:

    set<int, cmp> s; //# WORKS
    set<int, decltype(cmp2_item)> s2; //# NOW WORKS

For these:

    // Not ok because cmp is not a function comparison object, its a type
    nth_element(arr.begin(), arr.begin()+k, arr.end(), cmp); #ERROR
    // Ok because this is effectively passing a functor (and not just a type) 
    // I believe this takes a copy of the functor type (by construction), I 
    // am not quite so clear on the inner workings of the compiler in this
    // case. I guess its by type comparison, but possible compiler
    // implementation specific?
    nth_element(arr.begin(), arr.begin()+k, arr.end(), cmp()); #WORKS
    // This is ok because it passes an actual comparison object (that has
    // operator () defined).
    nth_element(arr.begin(), arr.begin()+k, arr.end(), cmp2_item); # WORKS

Basically you have to look more closely at what you are passing: a type, an object or a function - and what the specific STL accepts as a parameter.

Note:

comparison function object (i.e. an object that satisfies the requirements of Compare) which returns ​true if the first argument is less than (i.e. is ordered before) the second.

See here: enter link description here

When should you ever use functions over functors in C++?

Functions support distributed overriding. Functors do not. You must define all of the overloads of a Functor within itself; you can add new overloads of a function anywhere.

Functions support ADL (argument dependent lookup), permitting overloading in the argument-type associated namespace. Functors do not.

Function pointers are (kind of) a type-erased stateless functor that is a POD, as evidenced by how stateless lambdas convert into it. Such features (POD, stateless, type erasure) are useful.

function pointer vs functors in C++

For one, the functor can contain internal state; a state that is valid for this invocation of the function object only. You could add static variables to your function, but those would be used for any invocation of the function.

Second, the compiler can inline calls to the functor; it cannot do the same for a function pointer. This is why C++ std::sort() beats the crap out of C qsort() performance-wise.

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