Funny code in universal.c

[Jef Driesen]

On Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:07:33 -0500, Steve Boyd <sboydlns at gmail.com> wrote:
> I got an error while compiling universal.c with Visual Studio.  The 
> compiler didn't like the following line:
> 
>      device_data_t devdata = {0};
> 
> in dowork().
> 
> I changed it to:
> 
>      device_data_t devdata;
>      memchr(&devdata, 0, sizeof(devdata));
> 
> and now everything compiles cleanly.
> 
> Thought you should know.

This is standard C syntax to initialize all struct fields to zero. You can
find a nice explanation here:

http://ex-parrot.com/~chris/random/initialise.html

But it's very possible the msvc compiler doesn't support it. Getting the
msvc compiler to work isn't straightforward. I use a few C99 features,
which are not supported at all. The workaround I used is to build the C
code as C++. Note that the msvc project file is provided as a convenience,
but it's not maintained equally well as the autotools build system.

The recommended build system on windows is mingw, but with some extra
(manual) effort msvc should work too.