Higher order functions in C

Question

Is there a \"proper\" way to implement higher order functions in C.

I\'m mostly curious about things like portability and syntax correctness here and if there are mo

Answer 1

The big problem with implementing higher-order functions in C is that to do anything non-trivial you need closures, which are function pointers augmented with data structures containing local variables they have access to. Since the whole idea behind closures is to capture local variables and pass those along with the function pointer, it's hard to do without compiler support. And even with compiler support it's hard to do without garbage collection because variables can exist outside of their scope, making it hard to figure out when to free them.