Thank you all for some very interesting discussions so far. Even if we don't take blanket steps to avoid unsigned types in non-bitfield/modulo cases (as suggested by our newly-adopted Google style), at least hopefully we're now aware of their subtleties, and we can be more careful and deliberate in our choice of integer types in our respective domains.
Coming back to my original questions, I think the first part has not been categorically answered yet: Do we have style rules (or folklore) against naked `int`s/`unsigned`s, in favor of explicitly-sized `(u)intXX_t` everywhere? Thanks, Gerald On Thursday, July 4, 2019 at 3:11:27 PM UTC+10, Gerald Squelart wrote: > Recently I coded something with a not-very-important slow-changing > rarely-used positive number: `unsigned mGeneration;` > My reviewer commented: "Please use a type with an explicit size, such as > uint32_t. (General mozilla style; you don't see a bare "unsigned" around > much)" > > I had never heard of this (in 4+ years), so I did a bit of research: > > - I found plenty of `unsigned`s around, more than `uint32_t`s. > > - I can't see anything about that in our coding style guides [1, 2]. > > - Our latest coding style [1] points at Google's, which has a section about > Integer Types [3], and the basic gist is: Use plain `int` for "not-too-big" > numbers, int64_t for "big" numbers, intXX_t if you need a precise size; never > use any unsigned type unless you work with bitfields or need 2^N overflow (in > particular, don't use unsigned for always-positive numbers, use signed and > assertions instead). > > So, questions: > 1. Do we have a written style I missed somewhere? > 2. Do we have an unwritten style? (In which case I think we should write it > down.) > 3. What do we think of the Google style, especially the aversion to unsigned? > > Cheers, > Gerald > > > [1] > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Coding_Style > [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Using_CXX_in_Mozilla_code > [3] https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Integer_Types _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
