XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: johnl@taugh.com

According to rbowman  :
>On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 20:32:53 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>
>> C doesn't have variant records, but you can fake them with structures
>> with common initial fields.  The different structures can be different
>> sizes so the usual approach is to malloc() them one at a time and use a
>> pointer to it.
>
>Another approach is to have a struct containing union of structs with a
>flag in the top level struct indicating which child struct to use in the
>union. The structs in the union can also have unions so you can build a
>real octopus.

That works but the union is the size of the largest struct so it can waste
a lot of space compared to allocating each struct's actual size.  I realize
this doesn't work for arrays of structs or unions, but it works fine for
arrays of pointers to them.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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