Is Union Still Relevant in Programming Today?

[Pattielli]

Would you please tell me how "popular" it is today ? I mean if you are still using it in programming or not, since I have heard from many friends of mine that they don't use it at all, even once...So, how about you ? Your ideas are all appreciated, and thank you very much for your help..:sm:

 

[dduardo]

I've never had a case where I truly needed to use a union, although I could have if i wanted to. The place you'd want to use a union is when you want to save on memory. The union only allocates enough memory for the largest member. Structs on the other hand allocate memory for the total size ocuppied by every member. The only bad thing about the union is that you can only use one member at a time.

 

[Pattielli]

Thank you, I guess there are a lot of people here coming from C background :sm:
I made this question to ask them if they are still using it as one of the tools included to their making some applications...My background is not originally from informatics, I started learning computer programming also from C and now moving towards C++, i know only a little about both because I actually have no much time to handle them all...I used to be told some things about union too, that it is not oftenly used anymore but since it is also has its own special features which you already mentioned above, it could be exploited to get fitted in some cases... So the problem is how can we take advantage of its bad effects and turn them all into good ones...That is my main idea when creating this thread...

I have tried my best to understand what Andrei said in Andrei's paper about union, but actually and honestly have not yet figured out much all of Andrei's wonderful and great ideas...And I would also like to know if there are still any other things about union beside what is already mentioned by Andrei that we can learn and make use of.
If you have any ideas in mind about this, please tell me...I really would like to learn something from you...

Any ideas are all appreciated!
Thank you very much.