Hiding members in a C struct

Question

I\'ve been reading about OOP in C but I never liked how you can\'t have private data members like you can in C++. But then it came to my mind that you could create 2 structu

Answer 1

Something similar to the method you've proposed is indeed used sometimes (eg. see the different varities of struct sockaddr* in the BSD sockets API), but it's almost impossible to use without violating C99's strict aliasing rules.

You can, however, do it safely:

somestruct.h:

struct SomeStructPrivate; /* Opaque type */

typedef struct {
  int _public_member;
  struct SomeStructPrivate *private;
} SomeStruct;

somestruct.c:

#include "somestruct.h"

struct SomeStructPrivate {
    int _member;
};

SomeStruct *SomeStruct_Create()
{
    SomeStruct *p = malloc(sizeof *p);
    p->private = malloc(sizeof *p->private);
    p->private->_member = 0xWHATEVER;
    return p;
}