On 18 August 2013 19:32, Matthew Brush <mbrush@codebrainz.ca> wrote:

Hi,

It was pointed out to me on IRC that I went into too much details/patches and muddied the original question, so I propose it again more simply:

"Do you agree it would be better for Geany to use standard C types as opposed to GLib types which are typedef'd to the exact same thing?" (ex. gint->int, glong->long, gchar->char etc.)

Personally I can't find any great positives or negatives, but then I've trained my eyes to read gint as int, others may find standard code more attractive (or vice versa).

What I would be worried about is changing the existing code to use the standard types. Matthew has kindly illustrated the size of such a change, and while I'm sure 99.99% of the changes are fine, I would worry about the few places it might not be semantically equivalent, no matter how good the regexes that made the change are. The size of the change means we are never going to manually inspect it, and the places it will go wrong are not obvious, so we can't easily point to examples.

So whilst I wouldn't advocate changing the existing code (at least en bloc) I don't see any reason for disallowing standard types in new code and changes to existing code as it is touched.

Cheers

Lex

Sorry for any noise,
Matthew Brush