The author translates 1 line of C mess to 7 lines of Zig mess which are then manually simplified through transforms. Why not just apply transforms to the original C code? Or is this only for people who know Zig syntax but not C?
It's a blog post hosted on zig.news (so intended for an audience that knows Zig), I think we can safely assume that it's not meant to be an universal guide for understanding C code, but rather the recount of a (somewhat minor) experience lived by the author. It's even stated upfront:
> @rep_stosq_void on Twitter posted this strange sample of C code, and I wanted to show my process of understanding this contrived C code.
"I was presented with this code, and this is what I did to understand it"
I've happened to have written a lot of C, but some areas (like this one) I'm not as confident in. This way of casting, and working with types is very poor syntax in my opinion (I mean below in this thread you have people arguing about the spiral rule and such, it's obviously a common confusion).
Zig's way of expressing types and pointers is far superior, these transformations I made were done quickly and I didn't feel like there was any ambiguity or confusion in anything. Just a series of simple reductions, there are no "tricks" or easy mistakes to make in the code. It feels like a trivial proof.
Obviously I am biased, this was posted to zig.news. I thought it was a neat showcase of translate-c, and how zig does some of these things nicer. I'm not telling everyone that they should do what I did, but this works for me and I'm happy to share.
void f(int * a)
{
void * p = reinterpret_cast<void *>(&a);
***reinterpret_cast<int *(*)[]>(p) = 1;
}(not sure what steps that should be)