What is the preferred way to implement generic containers in C?

scintill76 · on March 22, 2015

I'm not an expert, but I was curious too and looked around. Apparently glib is pretty popular, and they just use void* (typedef'd to gpointer) for the type of items in the container: https://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.42/glib-Doubly-Linked-Lis...

mcguire · on March 22, 2015

There isn't. You don't do generic containers in C; you implement each specific data structure from the ground up to do specifically what you need.

This is both a strength and a weakness.

nitrogen · on March 22, 2015

You can write the containers as a ".x" file, which is just C with all of the type names replaced by a macro name. Then you #include the .x file where needed, #define the type before, then #undef it after. Token pasting in the C preprocessor makes for unique names, so multiple container types can be used in the same namespace.

CountSessine · on March 23, 2015

You don't. Go to the standards committee on bended knee and ask for another awkward addition to the language like <complex.h>.

marktangotango · on March 22, 2015

This is a banal question, flame bait at that.