15.19 Incomplete Types

A type that has not been fully defined is called an incomplete type. Structure and union types are incomplete when the code makes a forward reference, such as struct foo, before defining the type. An array type is incomplete when its length is unspecified.

You can’t use an incomplete type to declare a variable or field, or use it for a function parameter or return type. The operators sizeof and _Alignof give errors when used on an incomplete type.

However, you can define a pointer to an incomplete type, and declare a variable or field with such a pointer type. In general, you can do everything with such pointers except dereference them. For example:

extern void bar (struct mysterious_value *);

void
foo (struct mysterious_value *arg)
{
  bar (arg);
}

…

{
  struct mysterious_value *p, **q;

  p = *q;
  foo (p);
}

These examples are valid because the code doesn’t try to understand what p points to; it just passes the pointer around. (Presumably bar is defined in some other file that really does have a definition for struct mysterious_value.) However, dereferencing the pointer would get an error; that requires a definition for the structure type.