How do I use CCode attributes in Vala? - c

I am trying to use a C macro from Vala. It seems to me that this should be possible with the CCode directive but I fail to find any meaningful documentation about how to use it.
There is a brief section about CCode arguments in "The Hacker's Guide to Vala"
and a mailing list thread about calling a C macro from Vala with CCode.
But neither resource really helps me to understand what CCode really does. It obviously affects how Vala generates C code, from the Hackers' Guide to Vala I can deduce that the CCode directive probably gives me direct influence into how the CCode tree is created when traversing Valas AST.
Could anybody explain a little more what CCode does?

Unfortunately, there isn't a great deal of documentation about CCode that makes sense alone. What you need to do is use it in conjunction with the VAPI files that comes with Vala. At its most basic, you will probably use your macro something like this:
[CCode(cname = "FOO", cheader_filename = "blah.h")]
public extern void foo();
Here we are setting the cname (i.e., the name that will be emitted into the C code), and the cheader_filename (i.e., the header file that should be #included). Most of the other CCode attributes control how arrays are handled. array_length = false indicates that an array is of unknown length. This can be applied to a parameter or to the method, indicating that is applies to the return type. For instance:
[CCode(array_length = false)] public int[] x();
[CCode(array_null_terminated = true)] public FileStream[] y();
public int[] z();
In this example, x will have unknown array length and have an expected C prototype of int *x(void), while y is assumed to have a null-terminated array with the expected C prototype of FILE **y(void). Finally, z is assumed to have an array length out parameter (i.e., a prototype of int *z(int *length), where length is a pointer to where to store the length of the returned array.
All of these can be applied to parameters too. It's also useful to specify array_length_pos if there is an array length but it is not the argument immediately after the array. If a parameter is a delegate, target_pos specifies where the user data is passed (i.e., the void* that goes with the function pointer).
There's also a variety of CCode attributes for use with delegates, classes, and structs. instance_pos specifies where the class/struct instance or delegate user data goes. All of the position arguments are specified with a floating point number. This allows multiple positions to be encoded. For instance, suppose we had a C prototype:
void foo(void* userdata, int length, double *dbl_array, void(*handler)(double,void*));
then we might write this:
[CCode(cname = "foo")]
public void foo([CCode(array_length_pos = 0.2)] double[] array, [CCode(target_pos = 0.1)] Handler func);
Given Handler is defined as a delegate elsewhere, you can see that the pos values put the arguments after argument 0 (i.e., the start) and then in a particular order.
Classes and structs have functions to handle initialisation, destruction, and reference counting, but those are fairly straight forward. Handling generics is also a bit complicated. Again, the VAPIs are the best source of insight. However, that's enough to get you started on your basic C functions and macros.

Related

Is it possible to get a function name without invoking it?

How can i get a function's name without calling/invoking it, or is that even possible ?
I have an array of sorting functions, my goal is to be able to list the name of each one, dynamically, without having to invoke any.
After searching on the web, i couldn't find any solution that doesn't require the function being invoked and uses __FUNCTION__ or __func__.
The array of functions that is use:
// Pointer to functions
char *(*srtFunc[])(int *, int) = {selection, bubble, recursiveBubble, insertion, recursiveInsertion};
More information about what I want to achieve with this:
I want to loop over each function in the given array, create a file with the name of the function, invoke the function 100 times with different arguments each time, and print the time spent by the function each time in its dedicated file, redo for the remaining functions.
Unfortunately, not easily. C is not built for introspection and doesn't have features like this-- the name of function foo and the call to function foo are compiled down to just some jump and call instructions in the output; the actual name "foo" is essentially a convenience for you when programming and disappears in the compiled output.
The macro __FUNCTION__ is a preprocessor macro-- and as you note it only works within a function, because all it does it tell the preprocessor (as its churning through the text) hey, as you're scanning this token just drop in the name of the function you're currently scanning and then continue on. It's very "dumb" and is upstream of even the compiler.
There are various ways to get the effective result you want here, including most simply just manually building a table of string literals that have the same names as your functions. You can do this in fairly clean ways (see #nielsen's answer for a useful snippet) using macros. But the preprocessor/compiler can't help you derive or enforce a table from the actual functions so you will always have some risk of an issue at runtime when you make changes to it. Unfortunately C just doesn't have the capability for the kind of elegance you're looking for in this design.
You may be able to do something with smart preprocessor tricks, but your code would be difficult to read. I think I would go for the really low-tech solution here and just add an array of the function names matching the array of function pointers:
#define ARRAY_SIZE(A) (sizeof(A)/sizeof(A[0]))
// Pointer to functions
char *(*srtFunc[])(int *, int) = {selection, bubble, recursiveBubble, insertion, recursiveInsertion};
const char *srtFuncNames[] = {"selection", "bubble", "recursiveBubble", "insertion", "recursiveInsertion"};
_Static_assert(ARRAY_SIZE(srtFuncNames)==ARRAY_SIZE(srtFunc), "Function table and names out of synch!");
Having the two definitions just after each other makes it easy to keep them synchronized and the code is easy to read. The _Static_assert (available from C11) will help remembering to add new names as new functions are added.
Alternatively, a structure can be defined holding a function pointer and corresponding name. This can be initialized using a macro as follows:
typedef struct
{
char *(*srtFunc)(int *, int);
const char *srtName;
} sortMethod;
#define SORT_METHOD(S) {(S), #S}
sortMethod methods[] = {
SORT_METHOD(selection),
SORT_METHOD(bubble),
SORT_METHOD(recursiveBubble),
SORT_METHOD(insertion),
SORT_METHOD(recursiveInsertion)
};

why can't we declare functions inside a structure?

I read plenty of questions regarding
declaration of functions inside structure?
But I did not get a satisfactory answer.
My question is not about whether functions can be declared inside a structure or not?
Instead, my question is
WHY function can not be declared inside structure?
Well that is the fundamental difference between C and C++ (works in C++). C++ supports classes (and in C++ a struct is a special case of a class), and C does not.
In C you would implement the class as a structure with functions that take a this pointer explicitly, which is essentially what C++ does under the hood. Coupled with a sensible naming convention so you know what functions belong to which classes (again something C++ does under then hood with name-mangling), you get close to object-based if not object-oriented programming. For example:
typedef struct temp
{
int a;
} classTemp ;
void classTemp_GetData( classTemp* pThis )
{
printf( "Enter value of a : " );
scanf( "%d", &(pThis->a) );
}
classTemp T ;
int main()
{
classTemp_GetData( &T );
}
However, as you can see without language support for classes, implementing then can become tiresome.
In C, the functions and data structures are more or less bare; the language gives a minimum of support for combining data structures together, and none at all (directly) for including functions with those data structures.
The purpose of C is to have a language that translates as directly as possible into machine code, more like a portable assembly language than a higher-level language such as C++ (not that C++ is all that high-level). C let's you get very close to the machine, getting into details that most languages abstract away; the down side of this is that you have to get close to the machine in C to use the language to its utmost. It takes a completely different approach to programming from C++, something that the surface similarities between them hide.
Check out here for more info (wonderful discussions there).
P.S.: You can also accomplish the functionality by using function pointers, i.e.
have a pointer to a function (as a variable) inside the struct.
For example:
#include <stdio.h>
struct t {
int a;
void (*fun) (int * a); // <-- function pointers
} ;
void get_a (int * a) {
printf (" input : ");
scanf ("%d", a);
}
int main () {
struct t test;
test.a = 0;
printf ("a (before): %d\n", test.a);
test.fun = get_a;
test.fun(&test.a);
printf ("a (after ): %d\n", test.a);
return 0;
}
WHY function can not be declared inside structure?
Because C standard does not allow to declare function/method inside a structure. C is not object-oriented language.
6.7.2.1 Structure and union specifiers:
A structure or union shall not contain a member with incomplete or function type(hence,
a structure shall not contain an instance of itself, but may contain a pointer to an instance
of itself), except that the last member of a structure with more than one named member
may have incomplete array type; such a structure (and any union containing, possibly
recursively, a member that is such a structure) shall not be a member of a structure or an
element of an array.
I suppose there were and are many reasons, here are several of them:
C programming language was created in 1972, and was influenced by pure assembly language, so struct was supposed as "data-only" element
As soon as C is NOT object oriented language - there is actually no sense to define functions inside "data structure", there are no such entity as constructor/method etc
Functions are directly translated to pure assembly push and call instructions and there are no hidden arguments like this
I guess, because it wouldn't make much sence in C. If you declare a function inside structure, you expect it to be somehow related to that structure, right? Say,
struct A {
int foo;
void hello() {
// smth
}
}
Would you expect hello() to have access to foo at least? Because otherwise hello() only got something like namespace, so to call it we would write A.hello() - it would be a static function, in terms of C++ - not much difference from normal C function.
If hello() has access to foo, there must be a this pointer to implement such access, which in C++ always implicitly passed to functions as first argument.
If a structure function has access to structure variables, it must be different somehow from access that have other functions, again, to add some sence to functions inside structures at all. So we have public, private modificators.
Next. You don't have inheritance in C (but you can simulate it), and this is something that adds lots of sence to declaring functions inside structutes. So here we'd like to add virtual and protected.
Now you can add namespaces and classes, and here you are, invented C++ (well, without templates).
But C++ is object-oriented, and C is not. First, people created C, then they wrote tons of programs, understood some improvements that could be made, and then, following reasonings that I mentioned earlier, they came up with C++. They did not change C instead to separate concepts - C is procedure-oriented, and C++ is object-oriented.
C was designed so that it could be processed with a relatively simple compilation system. To allow function definitions to appear within anything else would have required the compiler to keep track of the context in which the function appeared while processing it. Given that members of a structure, union, or enum declaration do not enter scope until the end of the declaration, there would be nothing that a function declared within a structure could do which a function declared elsewhere could not.
Conceptually, it might have been nice to allow constant declarations within a structure; a constant pointer to a literal function would then be a special case of that (even if the function itself had to be declared elsewhere), but that would have required the C compiler to keep track of more information for each structure member--not just its type and its offset, but also whether it was a constant and, if so, what its value should be. Such a thing would not be difficult in today's compilation environments, but early C compilers were expected to run with orders of magnitude less memory than would be available today.
Given that C has been extended to offer many features which could not very well be handled by a compiler running on a 64K (or smaller) system, it might reasonably be argued that it should no longer be bound by such constraints. Indeed, there are some aspect of C's heritage which I would like to lose, such as the integer-promotion rules which require even new integer types to follow the inconsistent rules for old types, rather than allowing the new types to have explicitly specified behavior [e.g. have a wrap32_t which could be converted to any other integer type without a typecast, but when added to any "non-wrap" integer type of any size would yield a wrap32_t]. Being able to define functions within a struct might be nice, but it would be pretty far down on my list of improvements.

Implementing function delegates in C with unions and function pointers

I'd like to be able to generically pass a function to a function in C. I've used C for a few years, and I'm aware of the barriers to implementing proper closures and higher-order functions. It's almost insurmountable.
I scoured StackOverflow to see what other sources had to say on the matter:
higher-order-functions-in-c
anonymous-functions-using-gcc-statement-expressions
is-there-a-way-to-do-currying-in-c
functional-programming-currying-in-c-issue-with-types
emulating-partial-function-application-in-c
fake-anonymous-functions-in-c
functional-programming-in-c-with-macro-higher-order-function-generators
higher-order-functions-in-c-as-a-syntactic-sugar-with-minimal-effort
...and none had a silver-bullet generic answer, outside of either using varargs or assembly. I have no bones with assembly, but if I can efficiently implement a feature in the host language, I usually attempt to.
Since I can't have HOF easily...
I'd love higher-order functions, but I'll settle for delegates in a pinch. I suspect that with something like the code below I could get a workable delegate implementation in C.
An implementation like this comes to mind:
enum FUN_TYPES {
GENERIC,
VOID_FUN,
INT_FUN,
UINT32_FUN,
FLOAT_FUN,
};
typedef struct delegate {
uint32 fun_type;
union function {
int (*int_fun)(int);
uint32 (*uint_fun)(uint);
float (*float_fun)(float);
/* ... etc. until all basic types/structs in the
program are accounted for. */
} function;
} delegate;
Usage Example:
void mapint(struct fun f, int arr[20]) {
int i = 0;
if(f.fun_type == INT_FUN) {
for(; i < 20; i++) {
arr[i] = f.function.int_fun(arr[i]);
}
}
}
Unfortunately, there are some obvious downsides to this approach to delegates:
No type checks, save those which you do yourself by checking the 'fun_type' field.
Type checks introduce extra conditionals into your code, making it messier and more branchy than before.
The number of (safe) possible permutations of the function is limited by the size of the 'fun_type' variable.
The enum and list of function pointer definitions would have to be machine generated. Anything else would border on insanity, save for trivial cases.
Going through ordinary C, sadly, is not as efficient as, say a mov -> call sequence, which could probably be done in assembly (with some difficulty).
Does anyone know of a better way to do something like delegates in C?
Note: The more portable and efficient, the better
Also, Note: I've heard of Don Clugston's very fast delegates for C++. However, I'm not interested in C++ solutions--just C .
You could add a void* argument to all your functions to allow for bound arguments, delegation, and the like. Unfortunately, you'd need to write wrappers for anything that dealt with external functions and function pointers.
There are two questions where I have investigated techniques for something similar providing slightly different versions of the basic technique. The downside of this is that you lose compile time checks since the argument lists are built at run time.
The first is my answer to the question of Is there a way to do currying in C. This approach uses a proxy function to invoke a function pointer and the arguments for the function.
The second is my answer to the question C Pass arguments as void-pointer-list to imported function from LoadLibrary().
The basic idea is to have a memory area that is then used to build an argument list and to then push that memory area onto the stack as part of the call to the function. The result is that the called function sees the memory area as a list of parameters.
In C the key is to define a struct which contains an array which is then used as the memory area. When the called function is invoked, the entire struct is passed by value which means that the arguments set into the array are then pushed onto the stack so that the called function sees not a struct value but rather a list of arguments.
With the answer to the curry question, the memory area contains a function pointer as well as one or more arguments, a kind of closure. The memory area is then handed to a proxy function which actually invokes the function with the arguments in the closure.
This works because the standard C function call pushes arguments onto the stack, calls the function and when the function returns the caller cleans up the stack because it knows what was actually pushed onto the stack.

Same set of instructions, different types. How to handle?

In a C program I'm making, I will receive as command lines arguments a file path and a letter. The file is where I read data from, and the letter represents the type of data that is held inside that file.
The instructions I need to perform on the data are basically the same, only the type is different: it might be that the file holds ints, doubles or the values of a struct X. Regardless of type, the operations will be identical; how can I avoid repeating code? In C++ I would handle this with templates. How would this be typically handled in C?
In C you would do it through what you're hoping to avoid -- repeating the code. C++ makes this more convenient with templates, as you're aware, however that's just a simple way to repeat the code and base it on a different type.
Something that might be appropriate for you is to provide the different class functions but to not call them directly. Instead, based on your command line, determine once which function(s) will process your data, and assign them to function pointers. Then, your control loop will just generically call the processing function(s) using those pointer(s). This will obviously include whatever you do with the data, but you might also decide to have separate input functions based on data type.
Edit: As Mat says, there are come types which promote well and so one block of code would work fine. I suspect this is why your assignment includes working with some structure type.
The solution to this problem is obvious with modern objected oriented languages -- you make an object of each type that implements an interface (or via inheritance) of the actions you want to perform.
You can't do this in C because the language does not naively support object oriented, but you can "reproduce" the same functionality instead of letting the compiler do it for you. To do so you need to use a level of indirection specifically you will need to use function pointers.
So (as an example) one of the actions you might take is to read values from the file. One of your variables will be a function pointer to a function that takes as a parameter the file and a variable of type void (this will change for each function you write.) Write the function for each of your types and then at run type assign the function to use based on the type of the file.
In the realms of really ugly pre-processor tricks, if you want to replicate the body of a function for different types, but keep the code "structure" identical, you can do something like this:
foo.hc
#define YNAME(X) foo_ ## X
#define XNAME(X) YNAME(X)
#define NAME XNAME(TYPE)
int NAME(FILE* f) {
TYPE myvar;
...
return whatever;
}
foo.c
#define TYPE int
#include "foo.hc"
#undef TYPE
#define TYPE double
#include "foo.hc"
#undef TYPE
This foo.c will pre-process to:
int foo_int(FILE* f) {
int myvar;
...
return whatever;
}
int foo_double(FILE* f) {
double myvar;
...
return whatever;
}
All you need to do in your main processing loop with that is to dispatch to the right function depending on your file type. A plain switch statement can work pretty well, an array of function pointers could work too.
The new C standard, C11, has type generic expressions that you could use for this. There is not yet much compiler support for C11 but for example the latest version of clang has _Generic. You can also use P99 to emulate C11 features on top of similar extensions that are provided by gcc.

How can I write a generic C function for calling a Win32 function?

To allow access to the Win32 API from a scripting language (written in C), I would like to write a function such as the following:
void Call(LPCSTR DllName, LPCSTR FunctionName,
LPSTR ReturnValue, USHORT ArgumentCount, LPSTR Arguments[])
which will call, generically, any Win32 API function.
(the LPSTR parameters are essentially being used as byte arrays - assume that they have been correctly sized to take the correct data type external to the function. Also I believe that some additional complexity is required to distinguish between pointer and non-pointer arguments but I'm ignoring that for the purposes of this question).
The problem I have is passing the arguments into the Win32 API functions. Because these are stdcall I can't use varargs so the implementation of 'Call' must know about the number of arguments in advance and hence it cannot be generic...
I think I can do this with assembly code (by looping over the arguments, pushing each to the stack) but is this possible in pure C?
Update: I've marked the 'No it is not possible' answer as accepted for now. I will of course change this if a C-based solution comes to light.
Update: ruby/dl looks like it may be implemented using a suitable mechanism. Any details on this would be appreciated.
First things first: You cannot pass a type as a parameter in C. The only option you are left with is macros.
This scheme works with a little modification (array of void * for arguments), provided you are doing a LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress to call Win32 functions. Having a function name string otherwise will be of no use. In C, the only way you call a function is via its name (an identifier) which in most cases decays to a pointer to the function. You also have to take care of casting the return value.
My best bet:
// define a function type to be passed on to the next macro
#define Declare(ret, cc, fn_t, ...) typedef ret (cc *fn_t)(__VA_ARGS__)
// for the time being doesn't work with UNICODE turned on
#define Call(dll, fn, fn_t, ...) do {\
HMODULE lib = LoadLibraryA(dll); \
if (lib) { \
fn_t pfn = (fn_t)GetProcAddress(lib, fn); \
if (pfn) { \
(pfn)(__VA_ARGS__); \
} \
FreeLibrary(lib); \
} \
} while(0)
int main() {
Declare(int, __stdcall, MessageBoxProc, HWND, LPCSTR, LPCSTR, UINT);
Call("user32.dll", "MessageBoxA", MessageBoxProc,
NULL, ((LPCSTR)"?"), ((LPCSTR)"Details"),
(MB_ICONWARNING | MB_CANCELTRYCONTINUE | MB_DEFBUTTON2));
return 0;
}
No, I don't think its possible to do with without writing some assembly. The reason is you need precise control over what is on the stack before you call the target function, and there's no real way to do that in pure C. It is, of course, simple to do in Assembly though.
Also, you're using PCSTR for all of these arguments, which is really just const char *. But since all of these args aren't strings, what you actually want to use for return value and for Arguments[] is void * or LPVOID. This is the type you should use when you don't know the true type of the arguments, rather than casting them to char *.
The other posts are right about the almost certain need for assembly or other non-standard tricks to actually make the call, not to mention all of the details of the actual calling conventions.
Windows DLLs use at least two distinct calling conventions for functions: stdcall and cdecl. You would need to handle both, and might even need to figure out which to use.
One way to deal with this is to use an existing library to encapsulate many of the details. Amazingly, there is one: libffi. An example of its use in a scripting environment is the implementation of Lua Alien, a Lua module that allows interfaces to arbitrary DLLs to be created in pure Lua aside from Alien itself.
A lot of Win32 APIs take pointers to structs with specific layouts. Of these, a large subset follow a common pattern where the first DWORD has to be initialized to have the size of the struct before it is called. Sometimes they require a block of memory to be passed, into which they will write a struct, and the memory block must be of a size that is determined by first calling the same API with a NULL pointer and reading the return value to discover the correct size. Some APIs allocate a struct and return a pointer to it, such that the pointer must be deallocated with a second call.
I wouldn't be that surprised if the set of APIs that can be usefully called in one shot, with individual arguments convertable from a simple string representation, is quite small.
To make this idea generally applicable, we would have to go to quite an extreme:
typedef void DynamicFunction(size_t argumentCount, const wchar_t *arguments[],
size_t maxReturnValueSize, wchar_t *returnValue);
DynamicFunction *GenerateDynamicFunction(const wchar_t *code);
You would pass a simple snippet of code to GenerateDynamicFunction, and it would wrap that code in some standard boilerplate and then invoke a C compiler/linker to make a DLL from it (there are quite a few free options available), containing the function. It would then LoadLibrary that DLL and use GetProcAddress to find the function, and then return it. This would be expensive, but you would do it once and cache the resulting DynamicFunctionPtr for repeated use. You could do this dynamically by keeping pointers in a hashtable, keyed by the code snippets themselves.
The boilerplate might be:
#include <windows.h>
// and anything else that might be handy
void DynamicFunctionWrapper(size_t argumentCount, const wchar_t *arguments[],
size_t maxReturnValueSize, wchar_t *returnValue)
{
// --- insert code snipped here
}
So an example usage of this system would be:
DynamicFunction *getUserName = GenerateDynamicFunction(
"GetUserNameW(returnValue, (LPDWORD)(&maxReturnValueSize))");
wchar_t userName[100];
getUserName(0, NULL, sizeof(userName) / sizeof(wchar_t), userName);
You could enhance this by making GenerateDynamicFunction accept the argument count, so it could generate a check at the start of the wrapper that the correct number of arguments has been passed. And if you put a hashtable in there to cache the functions for each encountered codesnippet, you could get close to your original example. The Call function would take a code snippet instead of just an API name, but would otherwise be the same. It would look up the code snippet in the hashtable, and if not present, it would call GenerateDynamicFunction and store the result in the hashtable for next time. It would then perform the call on the function. Example usage:
wchar_t userName[100];
Call("GetUserNameW(returnValue, (LPDWORD)(&maxReturnValueSize))",
0, NULL, sizeof(userName) / sizeof(wchar_t), userName);
Of course there wouldn't be much point doing any of this unless the idea was to open up some kind of general security hole. e.g. to expose Call as a webservice. The security implications exist for your original idea, but are less apparent simply because the original approach you suggested wouldn't be that effective. The more generally powerful we make it, the more of a security problem it would be.
Update based on comments:
The .NET framework has a feature called p/invoke, which exists precisely to solve your problem. So if you are doing this as a project to learn about stuff, you could look at p/invoke to get an idea of how complex it is. You could possibly target the .NET framework with your scripting language - instead of interpreting scripts in real time, or compiling them to your own bytecode, you could compile them to IL. Or you could host an existing scripting language from the many already available on .NET.
You could try something like this - it works well for win32 API functions:
int CallFunction(int functionPtr, int* stack, int size)
{
if(!stack && size > 0)
return 0;
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
int v = *stack;
__asm {
push v
}
stack++;
}
int r;
FARPROC fp = (FARPROC) functionPtr;
__asm {
call fp
mov dword ptr[r], eax
}
return r;
}
The parameters in the "stack" argument should be in reverse order (as this is the order they are pushed onto the stack).
Having a function like that sounds like a bad idea, but you can try this:
int Call(LPCSTR DllName, LPCSTR FunctionName,
USHORT ArgumentCount, int args[])
{
void STDCALL (*foobar)()=lookupDLL(...);
switch(ArgumentCount) {
/* Note: If these give some compiler errors, you need to cast
each one to a func ptr type with suitable number of arguments. */
case 0: return foobar();
case 1: return foobar(args[0]);
...
}
}
On a 32-bit system, nearly all values fit into a 32-bit word and shorter values are pushed onto stack as 32-bit words for function call arguments, so you should be able to call virtually all Win32 API functions this way, just cast the arguments to int and the return value from int to the appropriate types.
I'm not sure if it will be of interest to you, but an option would be to shell out to RunDll32.exe and have it execute the function call for you. RunDll32 has some limitations and I don't believe you can access the return value whatsoever but if you form the command line arguments properly it will call the function.
Here's a link
First, you should add the size of each argument as an extra parameter. Otherwise, you need to divine the size of each parameter for each function to push onto the stack, which is possible for WinXX functions since they have to be compatible with the parameters they are documented, but tedious.
Secondly, there isn't a "pure C" way to call a function without knowing the arguments except for a varargs function, and there is no constraint on the calling convention used by a function in a .DLL.
Actually, the second part is more important than the first.
In theory, you could set up a preprocessor macro/#include structure to generate all combinations of parameter types up to, say, 11 parameters, but that implies that you know ahead of time which types will be passed through you function Call. Which is kind of crazy if you ask me.
Although, if you really wanted to do this unsafely, you could pass down the C++ mangled name and use UnDecorateSymbolName to extract the types of the parameters. However, that won't work for functions exported with C linkage.

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