Did you even make sure the memory was aligned?
Non-allocated memory (stack char) cannot be used like that. I'm sure you know alloc(), and malloc() is fast for small sizes.
Non-allocated memory (stack char) cannot be used like that. I'm sure you know alloc(), and malloc() is fast for small sizes.
Of course, what do you take me for? :)
> I'm sure you know alloc()
Do you mean alloca? It has a lot of problems, and is generally prohibited at Google.
> and malloc() is fast for small sizes.
Not nearly fast enough for my purposes.
> Yes, alloca. (Don't use it.)
> Just make a fast allocator that uses heap instead of the stack. You only need to malloc once and it can be used for any type since like you pointed out, it's effective type can be changed.
There is also the case where you have some raw data from a file or network, that you want to re-interpret as a struct. That is always dangerous with endianness and struct padding, but it is a very common practice. You could always memcpy from a char array to a struct, but that can waste memory.
At least that's the rationale for why we don't use it at Google.
Yep, blowing the stack will do that.