Default values in a C Struct

Question

I have a data structure like this:

    struct foo {
        int id;
        int route;
        int backup_route;
        int current_route;
    }

and a

Answer 1

You can change your secret special value to 0, and exploit C's default structure-member semantics

struct foo bar = { .id = 42, .current_route = new_route };
update(&bar);

will then pass 0 as members of bar unspecified in the initializer.

Or you can create a macro that will do the default initialization for you:

#define FOO_INIT(...) { .id = -1, .current_route = -1, .quux = -1, ## __VA_ARGS__ }

struct foo bar = FOO_INIT( .id = 42, .current_route = new_route );
update(&bar);