c) Totally hide the structure to the compiler, by just giving to it a forward-declaration and the defining it in the .c that actually creates the instances, so we don't tempt it to make weird optimizations based on his knowledge about the structure or the user to see it (the distributed .h headers would no contain any information about the structure).I think that I like this idea, but I would like to hear the opinion of other people before to take any decision about this issue.
I like it, yes. In this way those types will really be 'opaque' to the program using the library; and there is no possibility to use the internals of a given type (assuming it's a structure) in a way not defined in the API.
Cheers, -Aleksander
