How to replicate vector in c?

Question

In the days before c++ and vector/lists, how did they expand the size of arrays when they needed to store more data?

Answer 1

A lot of C projects end up implementing a vector-like API. Dynamic arrays are such a common need, that it's nice to abstract away the memory management as much as possible. A typical C implementation might look something like:

typedef struct dynamic_array_struct
{
  int* data;
  size_t capacity; /* total capacity */
  size_t size; /* number of elements in vector */
} vector;

Then they would have various API function calls which operate on the vector:

int vector_init(vector* v, size_t init_capacity)
{
  v->data = malloc(init_capacity * sizeof(int));
  if (!v->data) return -1;

  v->size = 0;
  v->capacity = init_capacity;

  return 0; /* success */
}

Then of course, you need functions for push_back, insert, resize, etc, which would call realloc if size exceeds capacity.

vector_resize(vector* v, size_t new_size);

vector_push_back(vector* v, int element);

Usually, when a reallocation is needed, capacity is doubled to avoid reallocating all the time. This is usually the same strategy employed internally by std::vector, except typically std::vector won't call realloc because of C++ object construction/destruction. Rather, std::vector might allocate a new buffer, and then copy construct/move construct the objects (using placement new) into the new buffer.

An actual vector implementation in C might use void* pointers as elements rather than int, so the code is more generic. Anyway, this sort of thing is implemented in a lot of C projects. See http://codingrecipes.com/implementation-of-a-vector-data-structure-in-c for an example vector implementation in C.