I'm no C expert, but those do two different things (fixed vs. dynamic length, stack vs. heap alloc). And the first one is safe with strncpy, right? Though I don

I'm no C expert, but those do two different things (fixed vs. dynamic length, stack vs. heap alloc). And the first one is safe with strncpy, right? Though I don't know why you'd ever have code like this unless you like undefined behavior and want to return the array. The second example seems fine and not particularly difficult or verbose.