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by madmoose 1100 days ago
> For C and Go, there really is only one prevailing idiom on how to write code

What’s the one idiomatic idiom in C for a growable list of items? Because I must have a seen a hundred of those in my time.

What’s the one idiomatic idiom in C for a hashmap? I’ve seen about a hundred of those too.

1 comments

I would think you are referring to implementations of the one prevailing idiom as opposed to seeing multiple idioms for the concept. The idiomatic way to represent a growable list in C is to make a list (using some implementation) and put it in a structure with bookkeeping data, then using that list by passing it (or a pointer to it) to plain old functions to use it.
Of course I'm talking about an idiomatic implementation, what else would I be talking about in this context?

> The idiomatic way to represent a growable list in C is to make a list (using some implementation) and put it in a structure with bookkeeping data, then using that list by passing it (or a pointer to it) to plain old functions to use it.

That sounds like a long-winded way to say "there's no one idiomatic growable list in C".