I honestly can't think up a reasonable case for a triple "naked" pointer. Nevermind performance, it's a level of implicit indirection that you simply can't reason about.
Think of what a pointer is. Picture a struct; accessing a member is dereference + offset. It makes sense, you know there's a car, and the car has a steering wheel, and the steering wheel has a horn button. Simple. A struct with one field, that field has an offset of zero - it fits our "naked pointer" case 1:1, but is more readable. The compiler will do the rest.
Yes, but the third level isn't a "triple pointer", but a pointer to the next level. A page table level isn't just a pointer-to-a-pointer but carries information. So a three-level table doesn't have `void***` in the top level, but `PageTableLevel2*`.
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I honestly can't think up a reasonable case for a triple "naked" pointer. Nevermind performance, it's a level of implicit indirection that you simply can't reason about.
Think of what a pointer is. Picture a struct; accessing a member is dereference + offset. It makes sense, you know there's a car, and the car has a steering wheel, and the steering wheel has a horn button. Simple. A struct with one field, that field has an offset of zero - it fits our "naked pointer" case 1:1, but is more readable. The compiler will do the rest.
As my dear friend often noted, "why simple?"
Think of page tables this is essentially a table of tables of tables. I also was meh on triple pointers until I found this use case.
Yes, but the third level isn't a "triple pointer", but a pointer to the next level. A page table level isn't just a pointer-to-a-pointer but carries information. So a three-level table doesn't have `void***` in the top level, but `PageTableLevel2*`.
As colejohnson66 noted. I would use typedef table, typedef page, etc. A void* is a pointer to the void. A page table is a table of pages.