Re:How I implemented my own crypto
by simias on Thursday August 03, 2017 @08:58AM
(#14919112)
I agree that the jab at microcontrollers is unwarranted (after all, I do want to be able to program microcontrollers in Rust!)
But you could still have any-bit integers even on an 8 bit processor, you'd just have to emulate them.
Clearly that's not really in the spirit of C which is probably why the standard doesn't force the compiler to implement those, instead relying on the coder to make a decision.
But that just proves my original point: C is not about portability. It's about writing fast code on any architecture. If portability was the concern the standard would make fixed-width integers mandatory and would define things like signed overflow, forcing the compilers to emulate the behavior when the hardware doesn't behave in the same way.
That's what portable languages do, that's what Rust does.
But you could still have any-bit integers even on an 8 bit processor, you'd just have to emulate them.
Clearly that's not really in the spirit of C which is probably why the standard doesn't force the compiler to implement those, instead relying on the coder to make a decision.
But that just proves my original point: C is not about portability. It's about writing fast code on any architecture. If portability was the concern the standard would make fixed-width integers mandatory and would define things like signed overflow, forcing the compilers to emulate the behavior when the hardware doesn't behave in the same way.
That's what portable languages do, that's what Rust does.