On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 6:11 PM Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 1:35 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I wish folks would use `u8 *` when they mean "byte array". > > Together with '-funsigned-char', we could typedef 'u8' to just 'char' > (just for __KERNEL__ code, though!), and then we really could just use > 'strlen()' and friends on said kind of arrays without any warnings. > > But we do have a *lot* of 'unsigned char' users, so it would be a huge > amount of churn to do this kind of thing. I think, though, there's an argument to be made that every use of `unsigned char` is much better off as a `u8`. We don't have any C23 fancy unicode strings. As far as I can tell, the only usage of `unsigned char` ought to be "treat this as a byte array", and that's what u8 is for. Yea, that'd be churn. But technically, it wouldn't really be difficult churn: If naive-sed mangles that, I'm sure Coccinelle would be up to the task. If you think that's a wise direction, I can play with it and see how miserable it is to do. (As a sidebar, Sultan and I were discussing today... I find the radical extension of this idea to its logical end somewhat attractive: exclusively using u64, s64, u32, s32, u16, s16, u8, s8, uword (native size), sword (native size), char (string/character). It'd hardly look like C any more, though, and the very mention of the idea is probably triggering for some. So I'm not actually suggesting we do that in earnest. But there is some appeal.) Jason
