Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Purge the silly GLib Basic Types

[Blue Swirl]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Michael Tokarev <address@hidden> wrote:
> 19.01.2013 13:33, Blue Swirl wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Markus Armbruster <address@hidden> writes:
>>>
>>>> See PATCH 1/3 for rationale.
>>>>
>>>> Markus Armbruster (3):
>>>>    Purge the silly GLib "Basic Types", except for gboolean
>>>>    Purge GLib's gboolean, it's a trap for the unwary
>>>>    checkpatch: Keep out the GLib silliness we just purged
>>>
>>>
>>> Changing QEMU code to work around checkpatch's failing is insane.
>>>
>>> When interacting with glib, use glib types.  Not using those types just
>>> makes the code more difficult to understand.
>>
>>
>> While the types are indeed useless and even cause problems (gboolean),
>> I agree with Anthony. It's the same as using DWORD for Win32 APIs.
>
>
> Actually it is far from DWORD.  DWORD is like uint32_t, where no
> standard C type matches (since these depends on the word size etc).
> So in Win32, these DWORDs are justified.

I think they are historic remnants of Win16. The machine word size has
not been 16 bits since ages and so double word should be 2 * 32 = 64
bits on Win32, QWORD should be 256 bits on Win64.

MS could have started using the standard types at some point: uint32_t
if the API needs 32 bits, long or intptr_t for machine words etc. I
don't agree with their compatibility strategy, but I don't appreciate
very much the Linux version (no ABI breakages ever) either.

>
> With GLib, things are sillier than that, since they redefine _standard_
> C types, without gaining anything in portability.
>
> /mjt