Impletaph

A Typesafe Dynamic std::vector equivalent in C

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a game in c, and inevitably in c, you have to deal with the fact that c doesn’t have std::vector or anything like it. If you want to store like items in a dynamically resizing container, you do have a few options. Let’s go on a tour.

NOTE: If you’re coming here from non c/c++ land, we’ll also be talking about the c-preprocessor a bit. c macros through the preprocessor perform naive text substitutions, with some limits on recursive substitutions we have to work around.

Hi! I'm Andrew,

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

and I’m an independent game developer. I’ve spent years building an engine framework and gameplay implementation for my game Sky of Embers. Back when I started this project, I felt that even having been out of college and working at start ups for a few years, I still didn’t have a good core of fundamental knowledge for my work in programming and engineering.

I remember many painful lessons about building software and its architecture in college and shortly thereafter. When I started Sky of Embers, I wanted to dive as deep as I could into the technologies underlying the game engines I had learned in college, like Unity and Unreal, to fill in that gap. At the time, I considered neo-langs like Zig, Rust, or Nim too young to be candidates for a long term software project. Not wanting to self-inflict c++ I settled for c after discovering Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero and Sean Barret’s stb libraries, which offered some insight into how one could use c and c++ in a more modern and less error-prone style.

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Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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