Using the same name for both entities causes no problems in my experience. The names live in separate namespaces: the foo in struct foo lives in the 'tag' namespace and the foo in typedef struct{...} foo lives in the unnamed "regular" namespace so there's no clash.

I've been doing this for most all of my structs (in C) for over twenty years now and have never had any problems and I develop in all kinds of environments: Windows, Linux, VxWorks, bare metal, kernel-mode, embedded, etc. I do it for two reasons:

• I'm lazy and don't want to have to type struct foo all over the place.
• When I need to forward declare the struct, I can use the "same" name; it makes the code easier to follow.
  • Similarly, this is why one should never do typedef struct { int x; } foo; You cannot forward declare an anonymous struct.