timhh

My favourite closed question is how to do Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ - closed as opinion based!

ChatGPT helped, but this is why you died StackOverflow.

I disagree. I still easily find new questions to ask, for example this one which is a nice demonstration of why StackOverflow is dying. Or this one (which also received 4 downvotes).

Even so, I definitely go to ChatGPT first now. Now that we finally have an alternative to the toxic downvotes/closing, why would I go there unless I absolutely need to?

I think he's talking about if a variable only exists in registers. In which case it is the size of a register. But that's true of everything that gets put in registers. You wouldn't say uint16_t is word-sized because at some point it gets put into a word-sized register. That's dumb.

things that store it as word size for alignment purposes

Nope. bools only need to be naturally aligned, so 1 byte.

If you do

struct SomeBools {
  bool a;
  bool b;
  bool c;
  bool d;
};

its 4 bytes.

The biggest problem is that each element doesn't have a unique memory address; iterators aren't just pointers.

You can’t read one byte

lol what. You can absolutely read one byte: https://godbolt.org/z/TeTch8Yhd

On ARM it's ldrb (load register byte), and on RISC-V it's lb (load byte).

Every decent compiler will turn booleans into words.

No compiler I know of does this. I think you might be getting confused because they're loaded into registers which are machine-word sized. But in memory a bool is always one byte.

I’m guessing there’s a reason they wanted min() to be able to be called without any arguments but I’m sure it isn’t a good one.

It not a totally unreasonable definition. For example it preserves nice properties like min(a.concat(b)) == min([min(a), min(b)]).

Obviously the correct thing to do is to return an optional type, like Rust does. But ... yeah I mean considering the other footguns in Javascript (e.g. the insane implicit type coersion) I'd say they didn't do too badly here.

Completely wrong. I'm hoping this was a joke... :-D

You can't store data in parity bits... so it's irrelevant.

It's not just less memory though - it might also introduce spurious data dependencies, e.g. to store a bit you now need to also read the old value of the byte that it's in.

I don't think so. Apart from dynamically typed languages which need to store the type with the value, it's always 1 byte, and that doesn't depend on architecture (excluding ancient or exotic architectures) or optimisation flags.

Which language/architecture/flags would not store a bool in 1 byte?

No it isn't. All statically typed languages I know of use a byte. Which languages store it in an entire 32 bits? That would be unnecessarily wasteful.