kkdwivedi

Right, totally depends on what you're doing. My example is not a good fit for intrusive use cases.

Another option is a struct with a FAM at the end.

  typedef struct {
      size_t len;
      uint8_t data[];
  } ByteBuf;

Then, allocation becomes

  ByteBuf *b = malloc(sizeof(*b) + sizeof(uint8_t) * array_size);
  b->len = array_size;

and data is no longer a pointer.