Can I treat a struct like an array?

Question

I have a struct for holding a 4D vector

struct {
    float x;
    float y;
    float z;
    float w;
} vector4f

And I\'m using a library th

Answer 1

Let's just throw all arguments about the Right Way™ to do something out the window for a minute.

Does it work to treat that struct as an array? Yes. Will it work in all cases, across all compilers and platforms? No.

Floats tend to be 32-bit, and even on my 64-bit machine, they get aligned on 32-bit word boundaries.

#include 

struct {
        float x;
        float y;
        float z;
        float w;
} vector4f;

float array4f[4];

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        printf("Struct: %lu\n", sizeof(vector4f)); // 16
        printf(" Array: %lu\n", sizeof(array4f));  // 16

        return (0);
}