Can union be used to store the value?

[openluopworld]

Hello, I have an idea to use an union structure to store the value. Just as follows:

`// union of a cJSON value
typedef union cJSON_Value {
// suppose the size of a pointer is 4-byte. valuestring[1] may be useless.
char *valuestring[2];
int valueint[2];
double valuedouble;
} cJSON_Value;

// struct of cJSON
typedef struct cJSON {
struct cJSON _next,_prev;
struct cJSON *child;
int type;
cJSON_Value value;
char *string;
} cJSON;`

The use of union can reduce the size of a JSON on the sacrifice of the portability. So, it's just a suggestion.

[DaveGamble]

It's a fair suggestion, and one that's been around a few times before.
The decision not to do this is based on a desire to /try/ and create some form of type-safety, however marginal. It would be trivial to directly set a double value and hence kill the char*, which is then memory leaked, and causes a crash in free(), etc... and those kinds of mistakes are really easy to make, and will take a long time to hunt down if you're new to the library.

So, yes, it sure could be done, but the memory cost is worth the debug-time cost.