Steven Engelhardt

Courtesy of my current reading, Herb Sutter’s More Exceptional C++, I have learned that it is possible in C++ to write a function which returns a pointer to itself using a somewhat sneaky trick:

class FuncPtr_;
typedef FuncPtr_ (*FuncPtr)();

class FuncPtr_
{
public:
    FuncPtr_(FuncPtr p) : m_p(p) {}
    operator FuncPtr() { return m_p; }

private:
    FuncPtr m_p;
};

FuncPtr_ f() { return f; }

OK, I admit that this function doesn’t exactly return a pointer to itself—it returns an instance of a class which is implicitly convertible to a pointer to the original function—but it accomplishes the same thing in effect. For example:

FuncPtr p = f();
p(); // or (*p)();