On: C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

[pjmlp]

The deal was dealing with #ifdef spaghetti to define all of those, especially when mixing libraries across platforms.

[ykonstant → pjmlp]

Ifdef soup is still horrible, so those times (which I didn't experience firsthand) must have been abysmal.

[sparkie → ykonstant]

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;

Don't need ifdef soup to test what the sizes of things are on different architectures - we just utilize the compiler's implementation of those types.

[pjmlp → sparkie]

Assuming that you don't need to target older compilers without C23 support, or where that isn't available as language extension.

[someonebaggy → sparkie]

Traditionally your compiler supported one type of computer and just defined them to what they were on that computer.