Programming

17318 readers

33 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte (wg21.link)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A new proposal for C/C++ to force bytes to be 8 bits wide

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.

This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as "bytes." These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++... and whether modern C++ cares about them.