[swift-evolution] [Draft] Target-specific CChar

[Jeremy Pereira]

> On 2 Mar 2016, at 18:56, William Dillon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
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> 
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> I propose that the CChar be aliased to UInt8 on targets where char is unsigned, and Int8 on platforms where char is signed.

This will make Swift code _less_ portable, since you will have to write different Swift code depending on whether your C implementation of char is signed or unsigned.


> 
> Alternatives considered
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> The only real alternative is the status quo.

No it isn’t. As long as CChar remains an alias to one of the integer types, it would be better to make it an alias to UInt8. The reason being that char * is often a pointer to a sequence of UTF-8 bytes and this interpretation is only going to get more common. String.UTF8View consists of a sequence of CodeUnits and UTF8.CodeUnit is, itself an alias to UInt8. 

As others have said, it might be even better to have a new opaque type that’s 8 bits wide (I assume we are ignoring the fact that the C standard doesn’t define the width of a byte) but, in that case, I would argue that bitwise operations should be allowed on it.

> Currently, Swift treats all unspecified chars as signed. This mostly works most of the time, but I think we can do better.