It is only fit to be used for heap allocation, you allocate the size that you need (i.e. malloc( sizeof(struct video_file2) + ARRAY_SIZE) ). It wouldn't work as

It is only fit to be used for heap allocation, you allocate the size that you need (i.e. malloc( sizeof(struct video_file2) + ARRAY_SIZE) ). It wouldn't work as a local variable. edit: I suppose one could use for globals or on the stack by casting a byte array ... I would find that to be unspeakably ugly but I don't write much C.