malloc an array of struct pointers

Question

I have the following struct:

typedef struct _chess {
   int **array;
   int size;
   struct _chess *parent;
} chess;

and I have:

typedef struct _chess *Chess;

Now, I want to create an array of dynamic length to store pointers to the chess struct so I do the following:

Chess array [] = malloc(size * sizeof(Chess));

This gives me an error: invalid initializer.

And if I drop the [] and do this:

Chess array = malloc(size * sizeof(Chess));

it compiles without error but when I try to set an element of this array to NULL by doing:

array[i]=NULL;

I get an error: incompatible types when assigning to type ‘struct _chess’ from type ‘void *’

Any idea what am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Answer 1

array is a slightly misleading name. For a dynamically allocated array of pointers, malloc will return a pointer to a block of memory. You need to use Chess* and not Chess[] to hold the pointer to your array.

Chess *array = malloc(size * sizeof(Chess));
array[i] = NULL;

and perhaps later:

/* create new struct chess */
array[i] = malloc(sizeof(struct chess));

/* set up its members */
array[i]->size = 0;
/* etc. */

Answer 2

There's a lot of typedef going on here. Personally I'm against "hiding the asterisk", i.e. typedef:ing pointer types into something that doesn't look like a pointer. In C, pointers are quite important and really affect the code, there's a lot of difference between foo and foo *.

Many of the answers are also confused about this, I think.

Your allocation of an array of Chess values, which are pointers to values of type chess (again, a very confusing nomenclature that I really can't recommend) should be like this:

Chess *array = malloc(n * sizeof *array);

Then, you need to initialize the actual instances, by looping:

for(i = 0; i < n; ++i)
  array[i] = NULL;

This assumes you don't want to allocate any memory for the instances, you just want an array of pointers with all pointers initially pointing at nothing.

If you wanted to allocate space, the simplest form would be:

for(i = 0; i < n; ++i)
  array[i] = malloc(sizeof *array[i]);

See how the sizeof usage is 100% consistent, and never starts to mention explicit types. Use the type information inherent in your variables, and let the compiler worry about which type is which. Don't repeat yourself.

Of course, the above does a needlessly large amount of calls to malloc(); depending on usage patterns it might be possible to do all of the above with just one call to malloc(), after computing the total size needed. Then you'd still need to go through and initialize the array[i] pointers to point into the large block, of course.

Answer 3

IMHO, this looks better:

Chess *array = malloc(size * sizeof(Chess)); // array of pointers of size `size`

for ( int i =0; i < SOME_VALUE; ++i )
{
    array[i] = (Chess) malloc(sizeof(Chess));
}