On Thu, 11 May 2023, 23:17 Kees Cook via Gcc, <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 09:43:49PM +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 May 2023, Kees Cook via Gcc wrote:
> >
> > > Why are zero-sized objects missing in Standard C? Or, perhaps, the
> better
> > > question is: what's needed to support the idea of a zero-sized object?
> >
> > Zero-sized objects break the principle that different objects have
> > different addresses, and the principle of being able to subtract
> pointers
> > to different elements of an array.  There would also be serious C++
> > compatibility concerns, since C++ allows a struct with no members but it
> > has nonzero size, unlike the GNU C extension where a struct with no
> > members has size zero.
>
> Okay, understood. If this is a C-only thing, we can ignore the C++
> impact. What depends on the "different objects have different addresses"
> principle? And why do unions not break this -- they could point to the
> same locations within the object?


You don't have two different objects with the same address in a union,
because only one of them "exists" at any time. You're reusing the storage
for one object at a time, not for all of the union members.