Is using flexible array members in C bad practice?

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It is an accepted “fact” that using goto is poor software engineering practice. That doesn’t make it true. There are times when goto is useful, particularly when handling cleanup and when porting from assembler.

Flexible array members strike me as having one main use, off the top of my head, which is mapping legacy data formats like window template formats on RiscOS. They would have been supremely useful for this about 15 years ago, and I’m sure there are still people out there dealing with such things who would find them useful.

If using flexible array members is bad practice, then I suggest that we all go tell the authors of the C99 spec this. I suspect they might have a different answer.

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