DConf 2013 Day 2 Talk 6: Higgs, an experimental JIT compiler written in D by Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, June 08, 2013 15:55:17 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/8/2013 2:23 PM, bearophile wrote:
> > - D integer types have guaranteed sizes, but
> > 
> >    they're not obvious from the name
> > 
> > - Why not have int8, uint8, int32, uint32, etc. in
> > 
> >    default namespace, encourage their use?
> > 
> > I agree. It's hard to guess the size and signedness of types as byte,
> > ubyte, wchar, dchar. I prefer names that are more clear.
> 
> It would only be a trivial problem for 5 minutes, only for ex-C/C++
> programmers who are used to suffering under variable sized ints, and will
> never be a problem again.
> 
> Is it really a problem to guess the size of 'byte'? Or that 'ubyte' is
> unsigned? Come on, bearophile!
> 
> And frankly, int32, long64, etc., have a large 'yech' factor for me.
> 
> Besides, if you really do want them,
> 
>      import core.stdc.stdint;

If I had been designing the language, I might have gone for int8, uint8, 
int16, uint16, etc. (in which case, _all_ of them would have had sizes with no 
aliases without - it seems overkill to me to have both), but I also don't 
think that it's a big deal for them to not have the numbers either, and I 
don't understand why anyone would think that it's all that hard to learn and 
remember what the various sizes are - especially when Java did something very 
close to what we did, and programmers seem to be fine with that. And the signed 
vs unsigned integers should be generally clear given that all of the integral 
types which are unsigned start with u and all those that don't, don't. The 
only exception is size_t which is already a bit of an oddity among the others, 
since its size can vary.

So, while some people might find the sizes of the types to be a little 
confusing at first, I find it very hard to believe that anyone finds them to be 
confusing for long. It's all quite straightforward on the whole.

- Jonathan M Davis