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Comment by kpil | Hacker News Reader

K&R C must surely be too old. It was starting to be old in the early 90s, and I think Linux and GNU where quite progressive in the days.

But, hum hum, What is considered non-old-school really modern C? Are there any new non-trivial C programs or systems anymore?

I look at the Linux kernel and some drivers occasionally, and possibly do some changes in some drivers and tools related to DVB and media, but I never look at "new" C code.

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Around the turn of the century people stopped going crazy with macros, globals and exposing struct definitions in header files, at least this is where I draw the line between old and new school

I expose struck definitions in header files too. What is a better or alternative way to do it?

> exposing struct definitions in header files

Hiding the struct like:

    typedef struct foo_t foo_t;
    /* ... */
    foo_t *foo_new();

kinda forces heap allocs. There are times when you want to allocate on the stack, and not use alloca.

Most of the time, I still keep struct definitions in header files, but API wise I always write functions or macros for anything that touches them and discourage direct access to struct members. Depending on the use case of course. Abstract types have their uses too.

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