This was very good!
I was really happy when the first code on the page, for once, did not look like it was written by someone writing C when they would much rather write something else.
This line:
struct article *my_article = malloc(sizeof *my_article);
Is almost exactly how I would have written it, and (to me) does three things very right:
- Does not use a pointless, wordy, bloated cast to somehow "convert" the pointer to the proper type. The point of malloc() returning a void pointer is that no such cast is needed.
- Does not hardcode a size, but uses the sizeof operator to let the compiler compute it.
- Does not repeat the type name, which is brittle and wordy, but instead (again) lets the compiler compute it from the target pointer.
I was a bit more hesitant about this line, later in the article:
return (void *)b + sizeof(block_t) + b->size;
Not sure what language standard is targeted by the code in the article, but being able to do pointer arithmetic with void pointers is a GCC extension which at least should be mentioned.
I was really happy when the first code on the page, for once, did not look like it was written by someone writing C when they would much rather write something else.
This line:
Is almost exactly how I would have written it, and (to me) does three things very right:- Does not use a pointless, wordy, bloated cast to somehow "convert" the pointer to the proper type. The point of malloc() returning a void pointer is that no such cast is needed.
- Does not hardcode a size, but uses the sizeof operator to let the compiler compute it.
- Does not repeat the type name, which is brittle and wordy, but instead (again) lets the compiler compute it from the target pointer.
I was a bit more hesitant about this line, later in the article:
Not sure what language standard is targeted by the code in the article, but being able to do pointer arithmetic with void pointers is a GCC extension which at least should be mentioned.