alt Hacker NewsThe real question here is: WHY are you passing a blob of memory rather than a struct that uses the type system to describe and enforce what the contents are?
I don't mean dressing up an anonymous pointer, which the author rightly complains about. I mean WHY are you making an API that takes such a pointer to an unknown type to begin with? Whenever you change the structure within that blob, your type checker won't flag that the receiver hasn't been updated to handle it.
Even worse: nothing's stopping you from accidentally passing in the wrong type.
And now you have a SEGV. Or a security hole.
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> The real question here is: WHY are you passing a blob of memory rather than a struct that uses the type system to describe and enforce what the contents are?
I completely agree. It's particularly egregious when the blogger complains that the complexity and ugliness lies in the type casting to force an incompatible type where it doesn't belong, and use a reinterpret_cast of all things.
This doesn't even feel like a strawman argument anymore. This sounds like a coding horrors entry.
I think the article names hashing as a use-case, which I can somewhat still agree. Operations that only depend on the bytes, I guess. But yeah, most things worth saying about this article have been said here already