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I'm no expert here, just curious. I've seen this brought up a couple times now: what's wrong with void pointers? How else would you do this in C? If you want

• lucozade 11y ago
  The limitation with void pointers is that it can only inline values <= the size of a pointer. If you have something larger then you need to allocate it separately which may have cache efficiency issues. The main alternative, other than hardcoding an element type, is to use macros and pass the element type in the definition. Sometimes you just don't have the option of a C++ compiler. Also, and this was a situation I was in recently, I needed a collection in a small area of my C code so it really didn't warrant a toolset change.
• woodman 11y ago
  Void pointers mean no type safety, preventing a lot of potential compiler optimizations and static analysis checks. 99% of the time the right thing to do is just create a new type: typedef struct Strref_t { char* str; size_t ref; } Strref; There, just pass a pointer of that type around.