Question

Recently I found it was annoyed to deal with array in c language.
I have to realloc() frequently to increase the size.
And there is no standard data structure like vector in C++ or Arraylist in java

I have got to known that in linux kernel, there is some data structure, such as
kfifo,
we could use this by kfifo_in(), kfifo_out() function.

But this means the user would define kfifo *pointer; to record the array, and this variable does not contain any info about the type contained in the structure.
The user have to remember that when he try to use the dynamic array by kfifo pointer.
I think it may be a little confusing.
Is there any better way to deal with the problem? What’s the common solution in linux c programing?

Answer 1

realloc is not that bad, as long as you do not spread it all over your code, and use a reasonable strategy to grow your dynamic array.

Rolling your own dynamic arrays in C is a matter of implementing a handful of easy functions. Numerous short articles walk you through this exercise – here is one for an example. The article defines a struct that represents your dynamic array, along with the currently used and the allocated size. It also provides functions for initializing, growing, and de-allocating the array represented by the structure. There is no explicit initialization function in the library – you initialize by passing NULL as the first parameter. This is a valid approach, but you could also opt for a more traditional separation of init and grow.