News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things into namespaces. Parent comment

Re:Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things... by comex on Sunday August 01, 2021 @12:08PM (#28027319)
C++ namespaces are unrelated to this. They don’t accomplish the same thing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things... by pjmlp on Sunday August 01, 2021 @12:22PM (#28027436)
The goal of inline namespaces is exactly to allow for migrating libraries across versions.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things... by comex on Sunday August 01, 2021 @11:13PM (#28032516)
That's nice, but the blog post doesn't say anything about migrating libraries across versions? Looking at the comment thread, I see tialaramex's sibling comment suggested the blog post was about migration, but it's not.

I suppose migration is another possible use case for the union trick, and for that case C++ inline namespaces can be used as part of an implementation that achieves a broadly similar goal, but in a completely different way. As tialaramex notes, with inline namespaces you still end up with two different types.

[ Parent | on HN ]