Re: [PATCH v3] Many pages: Document fixed-width types with ISO C naming

From: Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>
To: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>,
	Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>,
	Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>,
	David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
	Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com>,
	Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>,
	linux-arch <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>,
	Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>,
	Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>,
	Alex Colomar <alx@kernel.org>,
	Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>,
	Cyril Hrubis <chrubis@suse.cz>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	GCC <gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org>, LTP List <ltp@lists.linux.it>,
	Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
	glibc <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com>,
	Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>, bpf <bpf@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] Many pages: Document fixed-width types with ISO C naming
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2022 16:09:42 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <c02a6b7e4f8e377178b25c30d544420906346816.camel@xry111.site> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <017d77b8-8be3-a0a8-ce2e-17c7b6a16758@gmail.com>

On Thu, 2022-08-25 at 09:48 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi Xi,
> 
> On 8/25/22 09:28, Xi Ruoyao wrote:
> > On Thu, 2022-08-25 at 09:20 +0200, Alejandro Colomar via Gcc-patches
> > wrote:
> > > I don't know for sure, and I never pretended to say otherwise.  But what
> > > IMHO the kernel could do is to make the types compatible, by typedefing
> > > to the same fundamental types (i.e., long or long long) that user-space
> > > types do.
> > 
> > In user-space things are already inconsistent as we have multiple libc
> > implementations.  Telling every libc implementation to sync their
> > typedef w/o a WG14 decision will only cause "aggressive discussion" (far
> > more aggressive than this thread, I'd say).
> > 
> > If int64_t etc. were defined as builtin types since epoch, things would
> > be a lot easier.  But we can't change history.
> 
> This would be great.  I mean, the fundamental types should be u8, u16,
> ... and int, long, ... typedefs for these, and not the other way around, 
> if the language was designed today.
> 
> Maybe GCC could consider something like that.

GCC already have __UINT8_TYPE__ etc. but again telling all libc
implementations to use "typedef __UINT8_TYPE__ uint8_t" etc. will make
no effect expect annoying their maintainers.

-- 
Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, Xidian University