alt Hacker News"Naturally, sizes should be unsigned because they represent values which cannot be unsigned."
Unsigned types in C have modular arithmetic, I think they should be used exclusively when this is needed, or maybe if you absolutely need the full range.
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enqk • yesterday at 7:30 PM
yeah unsigned are really about opting to perform modular arithmetic, or for mapping hardware registers.
C is weakly typed, the basic types are really not to maintain invariants or detect their violation
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So do signed types (guaranteed to be 2's complement since C23, though all sane targets have been using that representation for a long time).
Two's complement encodes -x as ~x + 1 = 2^n - x = -x (mod 2^n) and can therefore be mixed with unsigned for (+, -, *, &, |, ^, ~, <<).
> I think they should be used exclusively when this is needed
The opposite: signed type usage should be kept to a minimum because signed type (and pointer) overflow is UB and will get optimized as such.