What is a "callback" in C and how are they implemented?

A simple call back program. Hope it answers your question.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <string.h>
#include "../../common_typedef.h"

typedef void (*call_back) (S32, S32);

void test_call_back(S32 a, S32 b)
{
    printf("In call back function, a:%d \t b:%d \n", a, b);
}

void call_callback_func(call_back back)
{
    S32 a = 5;
    S32 b = 7;

    back(a, b);
}

S32 main(S32 argc, S8 *argv[])
{
    S32 ret = SUCCESS;

    call_back back;

    back = test_call_back;

    call_callback_func(back);

    return ret;
}

Here is an example of callbacks in C.

Let's say you want to write some code that allows registering callbacks to be called when some event occurs.

First define the type of function used for the callback:

typedef void (*event_cb_t)(const struct event *evt, void *userdata);

Now, define a function that is used to register a callback:

int event_cb_register(event_cb_t cb, void *userdata);

This is what code would look like that registers a callback:

static void my_event_cb(const struct event *evt, void *data)
{
    /* do stuff and things with the event */
}

...
   event_cb_register(my_event_cb, &my_custom_data);
...

In the internals of the event dispatcher, the callback may be stored in a struct that looks something like this:

struct event_cb {
    event_cb_t cb;
    void *data;
};

This is what the code looks like that executes a callback.

struct event_cb *callback;

...

/* Get the event_cb that you want to execute */

callback->cb(event, callback->data);

There is no "callback" in C - not more than any other generic programming concept.

They're implemented using function pointers. Here's an example:

void populate_array(int *array, size_t arraySize, int (*getNextValue)(void))
{
    for (size_t i=0; i<arraySize; i++)
        array[i] = getNextValue();
}

int getNextRandomValue(void)
{
    return rand();
}

int main(void)
{
    int myarray[10];
    populate_array(myarray, 10, getNextRandomValue);
    ...
}

Here, the populate_array function takes a function pointer as its third parameter, and calls it to get the values to populate the array with. We've written the callback getNextRandomValue, which returns a random-ish value, and passed a pointer to it to populate_array. populate_array will call our callback function 10 times and assign the returned values to the elements in the given array.