Observations from an old timer playing with 64 bit numbers...

[Julian Elischer]

On 6/23/10 10:12 AM, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 09:50:26AM -0700, Randall Stewart wrote:
> ...
>>>> strong objection!
>>>> We should instead use names with exact sizes (16,32,64).
>>
>> So please tell me why you object so strongly? We have the 16/32/64 bit
>> names which
>> are nice but are not expected so folks seem to not use them. I have
>
> people's ignorance is not an excuse for not doing things right.
> We'd still be using BYTE, WORD and DWORD otherwise.
>
> I think there is no doubt that we should use the 16/32/64 bit names
> if we could start from scratch, and the only reason for not doing
> so is avoiding gratuitous changes to existing/stable code.
>
> The case of *to*ll does not apply, in that there is no actual legacy
> to adapt to. And btw there is tons of places which use the 16/32/64 bit
> names in the filesystem, usb and generic device drivers. In fact,
> many more than ntohl/htonl
>
> 	>  grep -r be32 ~/FreeBSD/head/sys/ | grep -v .svn | wc
> 	    1438    6397  145174
> 	>  grep -r le32 ~/FreeBSD/head/sys/ | grep -v .svn | wc
> 	    2203   10269  210989
> 	>  grep -r ntohl ~/FreeBSD/head/sys/ | grep -v .svn | wc
> 	     854    4009   84855
> 	>  grep -r htonl ~/FreeBSD/head/sys/ | grep -v .svn | wc
> 	     738    3604   72970


what he said..

if you want to have ntohll in SCTP then that is your choice, but I 
think it
should be a local define to be64toh or ntoh64
I do prefer the ntoh64 version but beXXtoh or whatever it looks like 
others are using is ok to me too since 'net' is a pretty wide 
definition and not ALL protocols are big endian.