Why is it that no one writes with portability in mind in druntime?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 25/11/13 11:34, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Many people seem to just use int everywhere, and a lot of D code failed to
> compile when 64-bit support was finally added.

Ack :-(

One thing that slightly rings alarm bells for me with D is that, because the 
integral sizes are fixed, people use short/ushort, int/uint, long/ulong etc. for 
explicit 16-, 32- or 64-bit integrals.  By contrast I do rather like the 
explicitness of something like uint64_t as a means of saying, "Yes, at this 
point in the code I really, really want a precisely 64-bit unsigned integral type."

IIRC we do have them in D code, but isn't their use frowned on?

>> The size_t case I rather like to think of is:
>>
>>        size_t m = ...;
>>        size_t p = 1 << m;    // should this be 1U, 1UL ... ?
>
> I'd be _very_ suspicious of any bitshifts that aren't done on types with a
> fixed size.

This was in fact exactly how I learned about how to handle 32- vs 64-bit issues. 
  I had some simulation code suddenly start generating different values after I 
installed a 64-bit OS.

My 32-bit code had run fine because the wraparound of the 1 << m bitshift 
brought it back around to where it was supposed to be (I was shifting it by 
about 30 or 31), whereas on 64-bit it was (surprise surprise) landing in the 
wrong place.

I doubt that I can say that I've _never_ written unportable code since then, but 
ever since, I've always tried to address such size-related issues.