{"id":305,"date":"2006-08-31T20:55:12","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T03:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/variable-declaration-guidelines\/"},"modified":"2020-07-25T23:28:48","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T06:28:48","slug":"variable-declaration-guidelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/variable-declaration-guidelines\/","title":{"rendered":"Variable Declaration Guidelines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2000, I came across this Advogato article about proper coding guidelines<\/a> for the coming wave of 64-bit machines. The most interesting part, I thought, was comment #2 (“C is portable, if you let it be”)<\/a> which offers some very sane guidelines for declaring variable types to just allow the compiler to do its job effectively. This is why I usually just declare int’s for numbers rather than uint32_t’s everywhere. There is often no reason to try to force particular types.<\/p>\n

Don’t think that you’re saving space by declaring a uint8_t instead of an int– chances are that you aren’t. I’ve disassembled enough C code compiled into 32-bit x86 machine code to know that a compiler will usually allocate 32 bits for that 8-bit variable. In fact, here is a small piece of code to drive the point home:<\/p>\n

stack.c:
\n