On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:58 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I just discovered, to my dismay, that size_t is only 32 bits, even on > 64-bit processors. Is there a particular pressing reason for this? A > quick investigation reveals that even dd(1) is affected -- this is IMO > not good. > > I'd suggest, given modern file sizes, that we bump it to 64 bits on all > platforms. Comments?
An important thing to ask yourself before suggesting things like this is "if this is such an obvious and trivial improvement, then why hasn't anyone already done it?". To put things in perspective, we had an entire release primarily predicated upon increasing the width of a similar type, time_t, from 32 -> 64 bits: https://www.openbsd.org/55.html
