Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?

On 20/03/2025 14:50, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:00:29 +0000
bart <bc@freeuk.com> wibbled:

On 20/03/2025 13:36, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Using the defined width types is far better (e.g. uint64_t);
even if the standard allows the type to not exist on a particular
implementation.  No useful implementation would fail to define
uint64_t in these modern times.

>
The point was made earlier on that int64_t types are awkward to work
with; they need that stdint.h header to even exist, and they need those
ugly macros in inttypes.h to print out their values.

 I've never found them awkward to work with and every *nix I've ever developed
on had stdint.h. If Windows doesn't thats Window's problem.

stdint.h is part of a C compiler; it's nothing to do with Windows. My remark was about having to write '#include <stdio.h>' on each one of the 100 modules of your project if you want tto use basic language data types.
That's unusual among mainstream languages.

 

This is why it popular to just do:
>
   typedef long long int i64;

 Popular maybe in WindowsWorld. Why as a unix dev would I do that when
standard typedefs already exist for this exact purpose?

They're popular everywhere:
   typedef uint32_t Uint32;                 // from SDL2
   typedef unsigned int GLuint;             // from OpenGL
   typedef unsigned int l_uint32;           // from Lua
   typedef unsigned int mz_uint32;          // from MiniZ compression lib
   typedef uint32_t stbi__uint32;           // from STB image library
   typedef uint8_t byte;                    // from arduino.h
   #ifndef UINT32_TYPE                      // from SQLite3
   # ifdef HAVE_UINT32_T
   #  define UINT32_TYPE uint32_t
   # else
   #  define UINT32_TYPE unsigned int
   # endif
   #endif
While GTK2 uses guint32 instead of uin32_t (sorry I didn't have time to locate the correct header out of the nearly 700; this is from: https://docs.gtk.org/glib/types.html#guint32)
Pretty much every other open source project I look likes to define their own types!
So I have to ask, why do think they do that?

stdint.h et al are just ungainly bolt-ons, not fully supported by the
language

Whats that supposed to mean? The core language itself supports very little.
Do you not use libraries at all?

Literal suffixes such as -L and -ULL are in the core language, and each 'L' refers to 'long'.
While printf format modifers such as "l"s in "%lld" are well-established in those sets of library routines. They do not directly supported stdint types (I think C23 may do something about that).
Lots of horrible-looking macros that few even know about are supposed to be used. So people instead use l/ll or L/LL and cross their fingers.

So somebody eschewing those ugly macros and using "%ld" to print an

 What makes you think they're macros?
 MacOS:
stdint.h
_types/_uint64_t.h
typedef unsigned long long uint64_t;

I didn't say they're macros. I said the types are defined on top the regular types, and macros are needed to print their values.