'int' is enough for 'length' to migrate code from x86 to x64

[Ary Borenszweig via Digitalmars-d]

On 11/21/14, 5:45 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/21/2014 12:10 AM, bearophile wrote:
>> Walter Bright:
>>
>>> All you're doing is trading 0 crossing for 0x7FFFFFFF crossing
>>> issues, and
>>> pretending the problems have gone away.
>>
>> I'm not pretending anything. I am asking in practical programming what
>> of the
>> two solutions leads to leas problems/bugs. So far I've seen the unsigned
>> solution and I've seen it's highly bug-prone.
>
> I'm suggesting that having a bug and detecting the bug are two different
> things. The 0-crossing bug is easier to detect, but that doesn't mean
> that shifting the problem to 0x7FFFFFFF crossing bugs is making the bug
> count less.
>
>
>>> BTW, granted the 0x7FFFFFFF problems exhibit the bugs less often, but
>>> paradoxically this can make the bug worse, because then it only gets
>>> found
>>> much, much later in supposedly tested & robust code.
>>
>> Is this true? Do you have some examples of buggy code?
>
> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html
>

"This bug can manifest itself for arrays whose length (in elements) is 
2^30 or greater (roughly a billion elements)"

How often does that happen in practice?