On Tuesday, 24 February 2026 at 21:37:44 UTC, Kapendev wrote:
On Tuesday, 24 February 2026 at 19:01:35 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
On Tuesday, 24 February 2026 at 18:49:58 UTC, user1234 wrote:
On Tuesday, 24 February 2026 at 16:56:57 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
[...]
The tagged union approach is actually faster when you deal
with a situation such as
- you only care about final types
- your final types have several bases
- you would cast a lot
- you don't care about nicely looking declarations (e.g SDL
event, XEvent, etc 🤢)
Consider the `old` function, a tagged union would add a layer
of indirection that does nothing.
You get the same type of indirection with a "mega struct" if we
are talking about type checking.
And you will be checking types often in a game.
There is literally no difference in how a tagged union and a
mega struct works if you create a union with members that all
share the same first field.
The only difference will be the size, with tagged unions being
smaller and faster to iterate over.
only with a pretty void* cast is accessing a tagged union field
that happens to line up 0 indirection, everyone here is going to
tell me to do the safe then and write an abstracted getter that
gets the .offsetof `age`.
If Im dropping the concept of different layouts, its safe and
doesnt need the abstraction and not repeating myself defining the
fields.
