3. Numbers
When I first learned C, the compiler supported 16-bit int
s and 32-bit long
s. A few years later, it became more common for int
to be 32 bits. A lot of code was written with assumptions about the sizes of C types, and this caused people a lot of problems when 64-bit systems became common.
The C99 standard introduced the stdint.h header, which defined types like uint32_t
, an unsigned integer that was 32 bits on any platform. This helped a bit, but on some platforms a cast between a uint32_t
and an unsigned int
was safe and wouldn’t generate a warning, since they were the same underlying type, while on others it was not.
Go learned from this mess and provides explicitly sized integer and floating-point types from the start. A uint64
is ...
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