Comment by jltsiren
4 hours ago
I like the Rust approach more: usize/isize are the native integer types, and with every other numeric type, you have to mention the size explicitly.
On the C++ side, I sometimes use an alias that contains the word "short" for 32-bit integers. When I use them, I'm explicitly assuming that the numbers are small enough to fit in a smaller than usual integer type, and that it's critical enough to performance that the assumption is worth making.
<cstdint> has int8_t, uint8_t, int16_t, uint16_t, int32_t, uint32_t, int64_t, and uint64_t. I still go back and forth between uint64_t, size_t, and unsigned int, but am defaulting to uint64_t more and more, even if it doesn't matter.
hindsight has its advantages
> you have to mention the size explicitly
It's unbelievably ugly. Every piece of code working with any kind of integer screams "I am hardware dependent in some way".
E.g. in a structure representing an automobile, the number of wheels has to be some i8 or i16, which looks ridiculous.
Why would you take a language in which you can write functional pipelines over collections of objects, and make it look like assembler.
If you don't care about the size of your number, just use isize or usize.
If you do care, then isn't it better to specify it explicitly than trying to guess it and having different compilers disagreeing on the size?
A type called isize is some kind of size. It looks wrong for something that isn't a size.
1 reply →
Is it any better calling it an int where it's assumed to be an i32 and 30 of the bits are wasted.