What is your favorite C programming trick? [closed]

C99 offers some really cool stuff using anonymous arrays:

Removing pointless variables

{
    int yes=1;
    setsockopt(yourSocket, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, &yes, sizeof(int));
}

becomes

setsockopt(yourSocket, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, (int[]){1}, sizeof(int));

Passing a Variable Amount of Arguments

void func(type* values) {
    while(*values) {
        x = *values++;
        /* do whatever with x */
    }
}

func((type[]){val1,val2,val3,val4,0});

Static linked lists

int main() {
    struct llist { int a; struct llist* next;};
    #define cons(x,y) (struct llist[]){{x,y}}
    struct llist *list=cons(1, cons(2, cons(3, cons(4, NULL))));
    struct llist *p = list;
    while(p != 0) {
        printf("%d\n", p->a);
        p = p->next;
    }
}

Any I'm sure many other cool techniques I haven't thought of.

While reading Quake 2 source code I came up with something like this:

double normals[][] = {
  #include "normals.txt"
};

(more or less, I don't have the code handy to check it now).

Since then, a new world of creative use of the preprocessor opened in front of my eyes. I no longer include just headers, but entire chunks of code now and then (it improves reusability a lot) :-p

Thanks John Carmack! xD

I'm fond of using = {0}; to initialize structures without needing to call memset.

struct something X = {0};

This will initialize all of the members of the struct (or array) to zero (but not any padding bytes - use memset if you need to zero those as well).

But you should be aware there are some issues with this for large, dynamically allocated structures.

If we are talking about c tricks my favourite has to be Duff's Device for loop unrolling! I'm just waiting for the right opportunity to come along for me to actually use it in anger...

What is your favorite C programming trick? [closed]

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