A lot of great opinions from both sides. I have created a small entry into our coding guidelines describing this debate [1].
I've prepared a small summary of the three coding styles we are using with respect to this issue: Older than grandma grandma current ------------------ ------- ------- unsigned long long u64 uint64_t long long ??? int64_t unsigned long u32 uint32_t long ??? int32_t I have seen zero lobbying for "Older than grandma", which is good. The debate remains between "grandma" and "current". The main issue here is consistency. Having both styles is bound to clash sometime in the future. We have code that calls "current" functions and stores the result into "grandma" variables. I doubt carrying on both styles is a good idea in the long term. I feel awkward lobbying for "current" considering I almost had a aneurysm when I first stumbled on usage stdint types in coreboot. Since then, I've started doing minor refactoring on our userspace tools, and lo and behold, we have duplicate files for userspace and coreboot. One example is the lzma decompressor, whose userspace counterpart I am currently refactoring. Userspace is stdint, no debate about it. So what happens when I take the refactored decompressor, and put it in coreboot proper? For consistency's sake, I would have to change "current" types to "grandma" types, which is, in plain english, an imperial pain in the poop hole. This is the exact argument Aaron and Peter are making, and it is the only practical argument I have seen thusfar. We're not linux, so the linux-legacy argument fails right off the bat, in my view. The other practical argument is finger strain from typing the "_t". I used to be a strong believer in that, until a bunch of other projects told me to "suck it up". Seriously, use a good editor, and it will autocomplete the "_t" for you. You'll soon find that looking at code for hours at a time is a lot more comfortable, and less eye-straining. "u32" is just too short to be eye-friendly. I'd like end by quoting my favorite part of this discussion: > Seriously though, you'll *get over that* really quickly if you start > using C99 standard types as a matter of routine. Your fingers don't take > that long to learn, as a one-off. > > But yes, you highlight the issue which is caused by people clinging to > their own *nonsense*, *non-standard* types instead of using the language > properly. Your fingers have to be retrained every time you switch > between projects. (empasis added) Alex [1] http://www.coreboot.org/Development_Guidelines#Variable_types
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