You can trade some safety for syntactic convenience by using pointers to the subarrays instead of a pointer to the multidimensional array, eg void do_with_

You can trade some safety for syntactic convenience by using pointers to the subarrays instead of a pointer to the multidimensional array, eg void do_with_array(size_t m, size_t n, int a[static m][n]) { ... } int (*a)[n] = calloc(m, sizeof *a); do_with_array(m, n, a);