Question

In C component selection, what is the benefit of structure-returning function? for example:

struct S {
   int a, b;
} x;

Why is it that I can assign the above struct as a function as shown below, Is there any benefit of doing this?

extern struct S f(); /* Why is this neccesary? */
x = f(); /* Is this accurate */

Open my eyes on this guys.

Answer 1

It’s just a function that happens to return a struct. There’s nothing more to it than that. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a function return an int, why be surprised when one returns a struct?

As an aside, the extern is superfluous here because that is the default storage class for functions.