Jean-Marc Valin

I realised recently that Speex tends to have a lot of array copies done using for loops instead of memmove()/memcpy(). However, I wasn't quite happy with just replacing everything with memmove()/memcpy() because of the very poor type safety they provide. For example, it's all too easy to change the type of an array and have memmove() doing the wrong thing without any warning. So, after a bit of thinking, I came up with the following macro, which I think should work:

#define SPEEX_MOVE(dst, src, n) (((dst)-(src)), memmove((dst), (src), (n)*sizeof(*(dst))))

Compared to memmove(), this macro does two things. First, it removes the need for using sizeof() in the length argument, removing a source of error. Second, the discarded (dst)-(src) value before the comma basically ensures that the compiler will generate an error if src and dst point to different types. Expect to see that macro appearing in Speex soon. I'd be curious to hear if anyone knows of any unwanted side effects of this, except of course the usual "don't use arguments with side effects" limitation.

Update: Actually, the following expression also has the advantage not producing a warning with gcc:

#define SPEEX_MOVE(dst, src, n) (memmove((dst), (src), (n)*sizeof(*(dst)) + 0*((dst)-(src)) ))