he strmap create function must return a pointer to a structure that can be referenced by the other

strmap functions in your implementation. That structure cannot be declared as a local variable in the

strmap create function, because the scope of the local variables of a function is just the body of that

function. In other words, they vanish as soon as the function returns. You need a way to allocate storage

for variables that persists across function invocations, and can be accessed $($via pointer$)$ from different

functions.