Safer Casting in C — With Zero Runtime Cost
C gives us two types of casting: Implicit casting — happens automatically in expressions and function calls, and Explicit casting — with the cast operator (T) v (e.g. (int) x). Both are powerful - ...
Source: DEV Community
C gives us two types of casting: Implicit casting — happens automatically in expressions and function calls, and Explicit casting — with the cast operator (T) v (e.g. (int) x). Both are powerful - and both introduce risks - making subtle, hard-to-detect bugs easy to introduce. I've been looking for safer way to use casts in C, and I came up with simple idea: replace (T) v with function like macros, similar in spirit to SQL's CONVERT(type, value). A Small Example (same behavior, better readability): // before, It it: // (*((long *) buf)) + 1 OR // *((long *) (buf + 1 )) OR // *(((long *) buf) + 1) long p = *(long *) buf + 1; /* after */ long p = *CAST_PTR1(long *, buf) + 1; Full Article (Medium - no paywall): Safer Casting in C — With Zero Runtime Cost I tried a simple approach: replace (T)v with function-like macros such as CAST_VAL, CAST_PTR, and CAST_PTR1, and UNCONST. The idea isn’t to make C type-safe, but to make casts explicit, structured, and easier to audit. Some basic checks c
