When I'm declaring a local instance of some context structure type to
pass to a function which will pass it in turn to a callback, I've
tended to use a declaration of the form
struct context actx, *ctx = &actx;
so that the outermost caller can initialise the context, and/or read
out fields of it afterwards, by the same syntax 'ctx->foo' that the
callback function will be using. So you get visual consistency between
the two functions that share this context.
It only just occurred to me that there's a much neater way to declare
a context struct of this kind, which still makes 'ctx' behave like a
pointer in the owning function, and doesn't need all that weird
verbiage or a spare variable name:
struct context ctx[1];
That's much nicer! I've switched to doing that in all existing cases I
could find, and also in a couple of cases where I hadn't previously
bothered to do the previous more cumbersome idiom.