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I have a general understanding of restrict but I'm hoping to clarify some fine points. I have a function that reads a null-terminated string from one buffer and writes out a URL encoded version in another buffer. The function has this signature (currently without restrict ): char const *StringUrlEncode(char const *unencoded, char *encoded, char *encodedEnd); unencoded is my null-terminated source string. The destination buffer is represented by encoded and encodedEnd , where encoded points to the first char in the buffer and encodedEnd points to the first char after the buffer, i.e. the function will write char s up to but not including the location pointed to by encodedEnd -- this is your basic begin / end iterator pair if you're familiar with C++ STL conventions. If I add restrict to this function, should it only be applied to the first two parameters: char const *StringUrlEncode(char const *restrict unencoded, char *restrict encoded, char *encodedEnd); or is there some benefit I'm not understanding by adding it to all three parameters? I can see that making the input and output buffers restrict helps the compiler know that they don't overlap. But since the last parameter, encodedEnd , is only used to mark the end of the output buffer, I'm thinking that restrict wouldn't really be any help to the compiler here (though I assume it wouldn't hurt, other than adding unnecessary noise to the function declaration).

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