Re: Strict aliasing, yes or no?

[Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org>]

You are making the situation sound a bit worse than it actually is.

> Not relying on aliasing forbids casting between dissimilar types, which
> rules out "normal" C tricks like casting between GArray and GRealArray
> (where GRealArray starts with the same members as GArray) as a way to have
> a partially-opaque struct, or an opaque-other-than-size struct on the stack;
> so regardless of whether it might be desirable to be writing Standard
> C, I'm not sure that GLib can do that without breaking its API.

C99 can do that, although access needs to be via a union type.
C99 section 6.5.2.2 #5.  No API break would be need to do it.


> whether the usual C pseudo-object-orientation idiom[1] (which
> is a fairly fundamental part of GObject) is considered to be valid in
> Standard C

That works fine.  C99 section 6.7.2.1 #12.

glib (etc) _is_ stomping on the standard in a hundred different ways.  Some
are for performance -- \0 filling, for example -- while others are pure laziness
and ignorance such as variables called "read" or macros name starting with "E".

Morten