[mort96]

The ifdef thing certainly isn't "stpuid". It's not good design, you wouldn't design it that way if you made libcurl from scratch today, but it makes sense as a solution to the problem of, "we can't change the type of CURL* in the public API, but internally, it ought to be defined as a pointer to a struct". If it was well-defined behavior, it would probably have been the best solution possible given the constraints.