What are the real benefits of flexible array member?

Question

After reading some posts related to flexible array member, I am still not fully understand why we need such a feature.

Possible Duplicate:
Flexible array members in C - bad?
Is this a Flexible Array Struct Members in C as well?

(Blame me if I didn't solve my problem from the possible duplicate questions above)

What is the real difference between the following two implementations:

struct h1 {
    size_t len;
    unsigned char *data;
};

struct h2 {
    size_t len;
    unsigned char data[];
};

I know the size of h2 is as if the flexible array member (data) were omitted, that is, sizeof(h2) == sizeof(size_t). And I also know that the flexible array member can only appear as the last element of a structure, so the original implementation can be more flexible in the position of data.

My real problem is that why C99 add this feature? Simply because sizeof(h2) doesn't contain the real size of data? I am sure that I must miss some more important points for this feature. Please point it out for me.

Answer 1

The two structs in your post don't have the same structure at all. h1 has a integer and a pointer to char. h2 has an integer, and an array of characters inline (number of elements determined at runtime, possibly none).

Said differently, in h2 the character data is inside the struct. In h1 it has to be somewhere outside.

This makes a lot of difference. For instance, if you use h1 you need to take care of allocating/freeing the payload (in addition to the struct itself). With h2, only one allocation/free is necessary, everything is packaged together.

One case where using h2 might make sense is if you're communicating with something that expects messages in the form of {length,data} pairs. You allocate an instance of h2 by requesting sizeof(h2)+how many payload chars you want, fill it up, and then you can transfer the whole thing in a single write (taking care about endianess and such of course). If you had used h1, you'd need two write calls (unless you want to send the memory address of the data, which usually doesn't make any sense).

So this feature exists because it's handy. And various (sometimes non-portable) tricks where used before that to simulate this feature. Adding it to the standard makes sense.

Answer 2

The main reason the Committee introduced flexible array members is to implement the famous struct hack. See the below quote from the C99 Rationale, especially the part I add the emphasis.

Rationale for International Standard — Programming Languages — C §6.7.2.1 Structure and union specifiers

There is a common idiom known as the “struct hack” for creating a structure containing a variable-size array:

struct s
{
int n_items;
/* possibly other fields */
int items[1];
};

struct s *p;
size_t n, i;
/* code that sets n omitted */
p = malloc(sizeof(struct s) + (n - 1) * sizeof(int));
/* code to check for failure omitted */
p->n_items = n;
/* example usage */
for (i = 0; i < p->n_items; i++)
    p->items[i] = i;

The validity of this construct has always been questionable. In the response to one Defect Report, the Committee decided that it was undefined behavior because the array p->items contains only one item, irrespective of whether the space exists. An alternative construct was suggested: make the array size larger than the largest possible case (for example, using int items[INT_MAX];), but this approach is also undefined for other reasons.

The Committee felt that, although there was no way to implement the “struct hack” in C89, it was nonetheless a useful facility. Therefore the new feature of “flexible array members” was introduced. Apart from the empty brackets, and the removal of the “-1” in the malloc call, this is used in the same way as the struct hack, but is now explicitly valid code.

There are a few restrictions on flexible array members that ensure that code using them makes sense. For example, there must be at least one other member, and the flexible array must occur last. Similarly, structures containing flexible arrays can't occur in other structures or in arrays. Finally, sizeof applied to the structure ignores the array but counts any padding before it. This makes the malloc call as simple as possible.

Answer 3

I don't know if this is considered as an important point, but GCC docs points this out:

GCC allows static initialization of flexible array members. This is equivalent to defining a new structure containing the original structure followed by an array of sufficient size to contain the data. E.g. in the following, f1 is constructed as if it were declared like f2.

struct f1 {
    int x; int y[];
} f1 = { 1, { 2, 3, 4 } };

struct f2 {
    struct f1 f1; int data[3];
} f2 = { { 1 }, { 2, 3, 4 } };

(taken from http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Zero-Length.html)