It is more a question regarding what is right in terms of methodology, not necessarily implementation, therefore I am not really looking for a code reviews.

I am implementing a vector in C. I am doing this for the fun of programming, for the fun of learning, and for the use of the data structure in later projects. This is not homework.

Now, I have read over many implementation examples and most of them take the size of an individual element as an argument to the Vector_create() function, and use this for later memmove()/memcpy() calls and what not and more or less keep (for instance) the vector's elements in contiguous memory. In other words, the underlying array is essentially a single void*.

In the implementation I wrote before doing a lot of looking at how other people have done it, I allow(force) the client code to allocate an "object" and pass that as a pointer to the Vector_append() function. So my underlying array is a void**. So I guess the real question I am asking is if this is wrong. Wrong as in best practices wrong.

I see that the "normal" way of doing this doesn't use an array of pointers and instead just copies the memory of a struct (for example) into the underlying void* array and thereby keeping the actual data of the elements contiguous, as mentioned earlier. My way avoids a crap load of memmove()/memcpy() because I just copy pointer values, however, I am forcing the client to malloc() everything that is sent to the vector, and thereby do a bunch of screwing around on the heap.

Along those lines, I do call free() on the underlying data item when the item is removed, so the vector library does a free() that the vector library never did the original malloc() on. Is this bad practice too? The only trouble I seem to get into is if there was a member variable (for lack of a better term) that points to dynamic memory within the struct. It then becomes the client responsibility to free() that data, but again, the struct itself is freed from within the vector library call Vector_remove().

I am implementing a vector in C. I am doing this for the fun of programming, for the fun of learning, and for the use of the data structure in later projects. This is not homework. My question is regarding methodology, not necessarily implementation, therefore I am not really looking for a code review.

Now, I have read over many implementation examples and most of them take the size of an individual element as an argument to the Vector_create() function, and use this for later memmove()/memcpy() calls and what not and more or less keep (for instance) the vector's elements in contiguous memory. In other words, the underlying array is essentially a single void*.

In the implementation I wrote before doing a lot of looking at how other people have done it, I allow(force) the client code to allocate an "object" and pass that as a pointer to the Vector_append() function. So my underlying array is a void**. So I guess the real question I am asking is if this is wrong. Wrong as in best practices wrong.

I see that the "normal" way of doing this doesn't use an array of pointers and instead just copies the memory of a struct (for example) into the underlying void* array and thereby keeping the actual data of the elements contiguous, as mentioned earlier. My way avoids a crap load of memmove()/memcpy() because I just copy pointer values, however, I am forcing the client to malloc() everything that is sent to the vector, and thereby do a bunch of screwing around on the heap.

Along those lines, I do call free() on the underlying data item when the item is removed, so the vector library does a free() that the vector library never did the original malloc() on. Is this bad practice too? The only trouble I seem to get into is if there was a member variable (for lack of a better term) that points to dynamic memory within the struct. It then becomes the client responsibility to free() that data, but again, the struct itself is freed from within the vector library call Vector_remove().

I originally asked this over on SO and it was flagged as too opinion based. It was suggested I post it over on Code Review. I posted it on Code Review but of course this post has no code and it is more a question regarding what is right in terms of methodology, not necessarily implementation(therefore I am not really looking for a code audit). So, maybe third time is the charm? Thanks in advance.

I am implementing a vector in C. I am doing this for the fun of programming, for the fun of learning, and for the use of the data structure in later projects. This is not homework.

Now, I have read over many implementation examples and most of them take the size of an individual element as an argument to the Vector_create() function, and use this for later memmove()/memcpy() calls and what not and more or less keep (for instance) the vector's elements in contiguous memory. In other words, the underlying array is essentially a single void*.

In the implementation I wrote before doing a lot of looking at how other people have done it, I allow(force) the client code to allocate an "object" and pass that as a pointer to the Vector_append() function. So my underlying array is a void**. So I guess the real question I am asking is if this is wrong. Wrong as in best practices wrong.

I see that the "normal" way of doing this doesn't use an array of pointers and instead just copies the memory of a struct (for example) into the underlying void* array and thereby keeping the actual data of the elements contiguous, as mentioned earlier. My way avoids a crap load of memmove()/memcpy() because I just copy pointer values, however, I am forcing the client to malloc() everything that is sent to the vector, and thereby do a bunch of screwing around on the heap.

Along those lines, I do call free() on the underlying data item when the item is removed, so the vector library does a free() that the vector library never did the original malloc() on. Is this bad practice too? The only trouble I seem to get into is if there was a member variable (for lack of a better term) that points to dynamic memory within the struct. It then becomes the client responsibility to free() that data, but again, the struct itself is freed from within the vector library call Vector_remove().

Well anyhow, I hope that actually made some sort of sense. And I hope this isn't too "discussiony."

It is more a question regarding what is right in terms of methodology, not necessarily implementation, therefore I am not really looking for a code reviews.

I am implementing a vector in C. I am doing this for the fun of programming, for the fun of learning, and for the use of the data structure in later projects. This is not homework.

Now, I have read over many implementation examples and most of them take the size of an individual element as an argument to the Vector_create() function, and use this for later memmove()/memcpy() calls and what not and more or less keep (for instance) the vector's elements in contiguous memory. In other words, the underlying array is essentially a single void*.

In the implementation I wrote before doing a lot of looking at how other people have done it, I allow(force) the client code to allocate an "object" and pass that as a pointer to the Vector_append() function. So my underlying array is a void**. So I guess the real question I am asking is if this is wrong. Wrong as in best practices wrong.

I see that the "normal" way of doing this doesn't use an array of pointers and instead just copies the memory of a struct (for example) into the underlying void* array and thereby keeping the actual data of the elements contiguous, as mentioned earlier. My way avoids a crap load of memmove()/memcpy() because I just copy pointer values, however, I am forcing the client to malloc() everything that is sent to the vector, and thereby do a bunch of screwing around on the heap.

Along those lines, I do call free() on the underlying data item when the item is removed, so the vector library does a free() that the vector library never did the original malloc() on. Is this bad practice too? The only trouble I seem to get into is if there was a member variable (for lack of a better term) that points to dynamic memory within the struct. It then becomes the client responsibility to free() that data, but again, the struct itself is freed from within the vector library call Vector_remove().