Forward an invocation of a variadic function in C

Question

In C, is it possible to forward the invocation of a variadic function? As in,

int my_printf(char *fmt, ...) {
    fprintf(stderr, \"Calling printf with fmt %         


        

Answer 1

Yes you can do it, but it is somewhat ugly and you have to know the maximal number of arguments. Furthermore if you are on an architecture where the arguments aren't passed on the stack like the x86 (for instance, PowerPC), you will have to know if "special" types (double, floats, altivec etc.) are used and if so, deal with them accordingly. It can be painful quickly but if you are on x86 or if the original function has a well defined and limited perimeter, it can work. It still will be a hack, use it for debugging purpose. Do not build you software around that. Anyway, here's a working example on x86:

#include 
#include 

int old_variadic_function(int n, ...)
{
  va_list args;
  int i = 0;

  va_start(args, n);

  if(i++

For some reason, you can't use floats with va_arg, gcc says they are converted to double but the program crashes. That alone demonstrates that this solution is a hack and that there is no general solution. In my example I assumed that the maximum number of arguments was 8, but you can increase that number. The wrapped function also only used integers but it works the same way with other 'normal' parameters since they always cast to integers. The target function will know their types but your intermediary wrapper doesn't need to. The wrapper also doesn't need to know the right number of arguments since the target function will also know it. To do useful work (except just logging the call), you probably will have to know both though.