What is the difference between static cast and C style casting

Question

Is there any reason to prefer static cast lt  gt  over C style casting  Are they equivalent  Is there any sort of speed difference

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static cast checks at compile time that conversion is not between obviously incompatible types  Contrary to dynamic cast  no check for types compatibility is done at run time  Also  static cast conversion is not necessarily safe   static cast is used to convert from pointer to base class to pointer to derived class  or between native types  such as enum to int or float to int    The user of static cast must make sure that the conversion is safe   The C-style cast does not perform any check  either at compile or at run time

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In short   static cast lt  gt    gives you a compile time checking ability  C-Style cast doesn t  static cast lt  gt    is more readable and can be spotted easily anywhere inside a C   source code   C Style cast is nt  Intentions are conveyed much better using C   casts   More Explanation  The static cast performs conversions between compatible types  It is similar to the C-style cast  but is more restrictive  For example  the C-style cast would allow an integer pointer to point to a char  char c   10           1 byte int  p    int   amp c     4 bytes  Since this results in a 4-byte pointer   a pointer to 4-byte datatype  pointing to 1 byte of allocated memory  writing to this pointer will either cause a run-time error or will overwrite some adjacent memory   p   5     run-time error  stack corruption  In contrast to the C-style cast  the static cast will allow the compiler to check that the pointer and pointee data types are compatible  which allows the programmer to catch this incorrect pointer assignment during compilation  int  q   static cast lt int  gt   amp c      compile-time error  You can also check this page on more explanation on C   casts   Click Here

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struct A     struct B   A     struct C       int main         A  a   new A           int i   10       a    A     amp i      NO ERROR  FAIL         a   static cast lt A  gt   amp i   ERROR  SMART       A  b   new B       B  b2   static cast lt B  gt  b      NO ERROR  SMART       C  c    C   b      NO ERROR  FAIL         C  c   static cast lt C  gt  b   ERROR  SMART

User · Answer

C   style casts are checked by the compiler  C style casts aren t  and can fail at runtime   Also  c   style casts can be searched for easily  whereas it s really hard to search for c style casts   Another big benefit is that the 4 different C   style casts express the intent of the programmer more clearly     When writing C   I d pretty much always use the C   ones over the the C style

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Since there are many different kinds of casting each with different semantics  static cast lt   allows you to say  I m doing a legal conversion from one type to another  like from int to double  A plain C-style cast can mean a lot of things  Are you up down casting  Are you reinterpreting a pointer

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See A comparison of the C   casting operators   However  using the same syntax for a variety of different casting operations can make the intent of the programmer unclear  Furthermore  it can be difficult to find a specific type of cast in a large codebase  the generality of the C-style cast can be overkill for situations where all that is needed is a simple conversion  The ability to select between several different casting operators of differing degrees of power can prevent programmers from inadvertently casting to an incorrect type

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A great post explaining different casts in C C    and what C-style cast really does  https   anteru net blog 2007 12 18 200 index html     C-Style casting  using the  type variable syntax  The worst ever   invented  This tries to do the following casts  in this order   see   also C   Standard  5 4 expr cast paragraph 5          const cast   static cast   static cast followed by const cast   reinterpret cast   reinterpret castfollowed by const cast

[c++] What is the difference between static_cast<> and C style casting?

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