What is this programming technique known as

[Emaer]

@jwatte

Finally, much C++ code these days use some kind of templated wrapper on top of “anything you can call” to hide these differences – you’ll instead pass in a std::function<> or similar, that is constructed based on the specifics of what it is you want to call, and it gets invoked using the operator() overload on the function template instance. (Which is a totally different thing from a “template function instance!” Words are hard!) The drawback with this is that the function that takes the function object as an argument, in turn needs to be templated. Unreal engine prefers not to use that kind of code style, because it generally generates bigger executables and pushes more logic to header files which in turn causes (even) longer compile times.

Of course this is true, but using templates (like <algorithm> from stl) gives the advantage that the passed lambda/function object can be inlined by compiler. Inlining gives massive boost in runtime and for me this is worth longer compilation times

In the case of using a traditional function pointer, I have doubts whether inlining is possible at all, and if so, probably under very restrictive conditions.

As always, everything depends on what’s your goal.