Re: [AD] Proposal: removal of zero-sized arrays

[Christer Sandberg <christer.sandberg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

onsdagen den 9 oktober 2002 23.35 you wrote:
> Advantages:
>  - dat2c will work nicely :-)
Can be done in other ways as well. Won't it be necessary to call an 
init-function if you introduce this?
>  - more generally, it is possible to statically-initialise structures
>    with zero-sized arrays (you might want to do this for sub bitmaps
>    etc. to make sure that their creation never fails, thus simplifying
>    your code)
Is this used by Allegro internally somewhere? 
>  - makes the code a little simpler in certain places (ie. the ZERO_SIZE
>    macro in header files, etc)
Minor
>  - AIUI zero-sized arrays are not ANSI C [1] (as always, please correct
>    me if I'm wrong)
This is an important item. Think of people who wants to port Allegro or parts 
of it to completly other platforms (maybe some hand-held object). Following 
ANSI is good.

> Disadvantages:
>  - requires somebody to do the work (I volunteer) and some work checking
>    and applying
Seems to be fixed:-)
>  - increases instance size by sizeof(void*) + alignment
... and the alignment cost will often be 0 (on all platforms where 
alignment==sizeof(void*))
>  - functions creating such structures require an extra line of code
Minor

To me it seems there are more advantages than disadvantages. To carry out the 
ANSI- item only, changing 'char data[0]' to 'char data[1]' would be 
sufficient.
/C