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Fear of the void

Posted Jun 22, 2004 12:46 UTC (Tue) by steve_rotolo (guest, #15915)
Parent article: Fear of the void

Consider the following interface:

struct funky; // forward decl

struct funky * funky_alloc (void);

void funky_dealloc (struct funky *);

int funky_dowhatever (struct funky *);

No magic, just C. The structure is private. All the user sees is pointers but the pointers are typed so the compiler can do the "magic" checking. Keep it simple.

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Fear of the void

Posted Sep 11, 2004 9:34 UTC (Sat) by jbglaw (subscriber, #10406) [Link]

This adds a lot of bloat. First, you introduce an own alloc and free function for each used struct. And further more, you completely break what was intended: to check pointers that were passed along from generic subsystem code. These are shipped as void * pointers, and void * always "works" with other non-void pointers...