My case is pretty simple: I want my C++ program to deal with Unix signals. To do so, glibc provides a function in signal.h called sigaction
, which expects to receive a function pointer as its second argument.
extern "C"
{
void uponSignal(int);
}
void uponSignal(int)
{
// set some flag to quit the program
}
static
void installSignalHandler()
{
// initialize the signal handler
static struct sigaction sighandler;
memset( &sighandler, 0, sizeof(struct sigaction) );
sighandler.sa_handler = uponSignal;
// install it
sigaction( SIGINT, &sighandler, nullptr );
}
My question is: is the extern "C"
linkage specifier necessary?
Bonus question: can uponSignal be declared static
?
My question is: is the extern "C"
linkage specifier necessary?
For maximum portability, yes; the C++ standard only guarantees interoperability with C via functions declared extern "C"
.
Practically, no; most sensible ABIs (including the GNU ABI used by glibc) will use the same calling convention for C and C++ non-member (and static member) functions, so that extern "C"
is only needed to share the function name between languages.
Bonus question: can uponSignal
be declared static?
Yes. External linkage is only needed to access the function by name from other translation units; it's not necessary to call the function via a function pointer.
extern C
is only necessary if you export your symbols from your binary or import them from another binary (typically in both cases, a shared library), in order to avoid name mangling.
Here this is not the case, you're not linking uponSignal
across various binaries so you don't need extern C
. All you're doing is pass your function's address to sigaction
from a function that already knows uponSignal
's address since they are (apparently) part of the same translation unit, or at the very least of the same binary.
Bonus question: can uponSignal
be declared static
?
Sure if you want. uponSignal
doesn't need external linkage anyway.