Why do we need C Unions?

Question

Unions are often used to convert between the binary representations of integers and floats:

union
{
  int i;
  float f;
} u;

// Convert floating-point bits to integer:
u.f = 3.14159f;
printf("As integer: %08x\n", u.i);

Although this is technically undefined behavior according to the C standard (you're only supposed to read the field which was most recently written), it will act in a well-defined manner in virtually any compiler.

Unions are also sometimes used to implement pseudo-polymorphism in C, by giving a structure some tag indicating what type of object it contains, and then unioning the possible types together:

enum Type { INTS, FLOATS, DOUBLE };
struct S
{
  Type s_type;
  union
  {
    int s_ints[2];
    float s_floats[2];
    double s_double;
  };
};

void do_something(struct S *s)
{
  switch(s->s_type)
  {
    case INTS:  // do something with s->s_ints
      break;

    case FLOATS:  // do something with s->s_floats
      break;

    case DOUBLE:  // do something with s->s_double
      break;
  }
}

This allows the size of struct S to be only 12 bytes, instead of 28.

Unions are particularly useful in Embedded programming or in situations where direct access to the hardware/memory is needed. Here is a trivial example:

typedef union
{
    struct {
        unsigned char byte1;
        unsigned char byte2;
        unsigned char byte3;
        unsigned char byte4;
    } bytes;
    unsigned int dword;
} HW_Register;
HW_Register reg;

Then you can access the reg as follows:

reg.dword = 0x12345678;
reg.bytes.byte3 = 4;

Endianness (byte order) and processor architecture are of course important.

Another useful feature is the bit modifier:

typedef union
{
    struct {
        unsigned char b1:1;
        unsigned char b2:1;
        unsigned char b3:1;
        unsigned char b4:1;
        unsigned char reserved:4;
    } bits;
    unsigned char byte;
} HW_RegisterB;
HW_RegisterB reg;

With this code you can access directly a single bit in the register/memory address:

x = reg.bits.b2;

Low level system programming is a reasonable example.

IIRC, I've used unions to breakdown hardware registers into the component bits. So, you can access an 8-bit register (as it was, in the day I did this ;-) into the component bits.

(I forget the exact syntax but...) This structure would allow a control register to be accessed as a control_byte or via the individual bits. It would be important to ensure the bits map on to the correct register bits for a given endianness.

typedef union {
    unsigned char control_byte;
    struct {
        unsigned int nibble  : 4;
        unsigned int nmi     : 1;
        unsigned int enabled : 1;
        unsigned int fired   : 1;
        unsigned int control : 1;
    };
} ControlRegister;

I've seen it in a couple of libraries as a replacement for object oriented inheritance.

E.g.

        Connection
     /       |       \
  Network   USB     VirtualConnection

If you want the Connection "class" to be either one of the above, you could write something like:

struct Connection
{
    int type;
    union
    {
        struct Network network;
        struct USB usb;
        struct Virtual virtual;
    }
};

Example use in libinfinity: http://git.0x539.de/?p=infinote.git;a=blob;f=libinfinity/common/inf-session.c;h=3e887f0d63bd754c6b5ec232948027cbbf4d61fc;hb=HEAD#l74

Unions allow data members which are mutually exclusive to share the same memory. This is quite important when memory is more scarce, such as in embedded systems.

In the following example:

union {
   int a;
   int b;
   int c;
} myUnion;

This union will take up the space of a single int, rather than 3 separate int values. If the user set the value of a, and then set the value of b, it would overwrite the value of a since they are both sharing the same memory location.