Dynamically Allocating a Struct within a Struct

Question

I am dynamically allocating a struct which has a different struct as a member:

struct a {
   // other members
   struct b;
}

struct b

Answer 1

The difference is really equivalent to any other situation where you're comparing "automatic" and "dynamic" allocation.¹

In terms of a guide as when you should use a pointer member, I would say that you should avoid it unless there's a good reason not to, due to the programmer overhead in dealing with manual memory management (and the bugs that it inevitably leads to).

An example of a good reason would be if you needed your struct a to refer to an existing struct b.

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_{1. "automatic" is the term used in the C standard for this sort of allocation, because the memory is cleaned up automatically.}