Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by pjmlp on Sunday September 27, 2026 @06:16AM
(#49865283)
The deal was dealing with #ifdef spaghetti to define all of those, especially when mixing libraries across platforms.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by ykonstant on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:24PM
(#49869954)
Ifdef soup is still horrible, so those times (which I didn't experience firsthand) must have been abysmal.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by sparkie on Sunday September 27, 2026 @05:56PM
(#49871263)
If you want to know how bad it can be, only need to take a look at GCC's implementation of `stddef.h` for `size_t` and `ptrdiff_t` etc.
https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/ginclude/s...
There's a simpler way to define these types in newer versions of C which have `typeof`, we can take advantage of the fact that `sizeof()` always returns a `size_t`, `ptr - ptr` always returns a `ptrdiff_t`, and a literal L'c' has type `wchar_t`, etc.
typedef typeof(sizeof(0)) size_t;
typedef typeof(nullptr) nullptr_t;
typedef typeof((void*)0-(void*)0) ptrdiff_t;
typedef typeof(L'\0') wchar_t;
typedef typeof(u8'\0') char8_t;
typedef typeof(u'\0') char16_t;
typedef typeof(U'\0') char32_t;
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by someonebaggy on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:11PM
(#49872765)
Traditionally your compiler supported one type of computer and just defined them to what they were on that computer.
I think the only real annoyance is that each programmer/team did it with their own convention (I32, INT32, i32, int32, WORD, Word bool, BOOL, Bool, etc., etc.); standardizing helps with putting everyone on the same page more than it helps porting. It doesn't prevent people from reverse-typedef-ing standard names to local "dialectal" names, though.
But I also think that one should only rarely use raw integer types, in an ideal world; the elephant in the room is that typedef is kind of the second "billion dollars mistake" [1]. C is a weakly typed language and there's no practical way to undo it (besides transpilation), so there's double no point to leave behind raw types.
[1] For those not too familiar with C, typedef defines a "type alias", not a type: https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/typedef