Compound literals in MSVC

Question

In GCC, I'm able to do this:

(CachedPath){ino}
inode->data = (struct Data)DATA_INIT;

where:

struct CachedPath
{
    Ino ino;
};

typedef int8_t Depth;
struct Data
{
    Offset size;
    Blkno root;
    Depth depth;
};
#define DATA_INIT {0, -1, 0}

MSVC gives the following error for these kind of casts:

error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '{'

How can I do this in MSVC? Further note that the code has been converted from C99, where I used designated initializers for this, and then cast it similarly. Any clarity on how these various features relate between C99, and MSVC/GCC implementations of C++ is appreciated.

Answer 1

The construct (Type){initialisers} is not a cast operation, but it is the syntactic construct of a compound literal. This is a C99 construct, which GCC also supports in its C++ compiler as an extension. As far as I can determine, compound literals are not supported up to and including MSVC 2012, in either its C or C++ mode. The support in C mode was introduced later, in MSVC 2013. In C++ mode it is still not supported and I believe it is unlikely support will be added.

For MSVC 2012 and older, the alternatives for this construct are

• Explicitly declare and initialise a temporary object of the desired struct type and use that instead of the compound literal in the assignment
• Instead of doing a single assignment with the compound literal, use a separate assignment for each individual member.