alt Hacker NewsSystems programmers love to hate on unsigned integers. Generations have been infected with the Java world model that integers have to be pretend number lines centered on zero. Guess what, you still have boundary conditions to deal with. There are times when you really really need to use the full word range without negative values. This happens more often with low level programming and machines with small word sizes, something fewer people are engaged in. It doesn't need to be the default. Ada has them sequestered as modular types but it's available to use when needed.
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Having them available is not the issue, using them for sizes and indices is what causes a lot of tricky bugs.
In Java, unsigned arithmetic is available through an API and, as you said, it is pretty much only needed when marshalling to certain wire protocols or for FFI. Built-in unsigned types are useful primarily for bitfields or similar tiny types with up to 6 bits or so.
> Systems programmers love to hate on unsigned integers
I don't see this hate in Rust. I think this is a big thing in the C-related languages, and that the author has chosen to pretend that's the same for any "systems language" but it is not.
> There are times when you really really need to use the full word range without negative values.
There are a few of those, but that is the niche case. Certainly when we're talking about 64-bit size types. And if you want to cater to smaller size types, then just just template over the size type. Or, OK, some other trick if it's C rather than C++.
Java doesn't have unsigned as primitive types, because James Gosling did a series of interviews at Sun among "expert" C devs, and all got the C language rules for unsigned arithmetic wrong.
Yes I miss them in Java as primitives, however there are utility methods for unsigned arithmetic, that get it right.