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JF Bastien is a legend for this, haha. I would be amazed if there's any even remotely relevant code that deals meaningfully with CHAR_BIT != 8 these days. (... and yes, it's about time.)
Edit: I see TFA mentions them but questions how relevant C++ is in that sort of embedded environment.
JF Bastien is a legend for this, haha. I would be amazed if there's any even remotely relevant code that deals meaningfully with CHAR_BIT != 8 these days. (... and yes, it's about time.)
For some DSP-ish sort of processors I think it doesn't make sense to have addressability at char level, and the gates to support it would be better spent on better 16 and 32 bit multipliers. ::shrugs::
I feel kind of ambivalent about the standards proposal. We already have fixed size types. If you want/need an exact type, that already exists. The non-fixed size types set minimums and allow platforms to set larger sizes for performance reasons.
Having no fast 8-bit level access is a perfectly reasonable decision for a small DSP.
Might it be better instead to migrate many users of char to (u)int8_t?
The proposed alternative of CHAR_BIT congruent to 0 mod 8 also sounds pretty reasonable, in that it captures the existing non-8-bit char platforms and also the justification for non-8-bit char platforms (that if you're not doing much string processing but instead doing all math processing, the additional hardware for efficient 8 bit access is a total waste).
But think of ternary computers!
Not sure about that, seems pretty controversial to me. Are we forgetting about the UNIVACs?
so delegating such by now very very edge cases to non standard C seems fine, i.e. seems to IMHO not change much at all in practice
and C/C++ compilers are anyway full of non standard extensions and it's not that CHAR_BIT go away or you as a non-standard extension assume it might not be 8