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You can re-interpret the struct to a pointer (length would simply be truncated). Apart from that there wouldn't be any benefit: the pointer and length would be
by zamalek 8y ago
You can re-interpret the struct to a pointer (length would simply be truncated). Apart from that there wouldn't be any benefit: the pointer and length would be aligned no matter which position they take (on x86 and amd64 at the very least).
- c-smile 8y ago"re-interpret the struct to a pointer (length would simply be truncated)." Wrong. It will be pointer-to-pointer. Reinterpretation (to treat struct as a pointer to C string) is only possible if you have something like this: struct BSTR { size_t length; WCHAR chars[N]; // N is length + 1 }; and you return pointer to chars[0]. This is so called Basic string - BSTR is a WCHAR* pointer to memory location prepended by string length field.
- zamalek 8y agoThat's not what I was going after. You can treat the memory location (where the structure resides) as a pointer, plan and simple, nothing more fancy than what I said.