That's likely thanks to C which goes to great pains to not specify the size of the basic types. For example, for 64 bit architectures, "long" is 32 bits on the Mac and 64 bits everywhere else.
The net result of that is I never use C "long", instead using "int" and "long long".
This mess is why D has 32 bit ints and 64 bit longs, whether it's a 32 bit machine or a 64 bit machine. The result was we haven't had porting problems with integer sizes.
I've met very few folks who understand the overheads involved, and how extreme the benefits can be from avoiding those.
The sort of insane stuff I've seen on the dotnet repo where people are trying to tear apart the entire type system just because they think they've cracked some secret performance code.
You mean the .net compiler/runtime itself? I haven't looked at it, but isn't that the one place you'd expect to see weirdly low-level C# code?
And you have a frame with an operands stack where you should be able to store at least a 32-bit value. `double` would just fill 2 adjacent slots.
And references are just pointers (possibly not using the whole of the value as an address, but as flags for e.g. the GC) pointing to objects, whose internal structure is implementation detail, but usually having a header and the fields (that can again be reference types).
Pretty standard stuff, heap allocating stuff is pretty common in C as well.
And unlike C, it will run the exact same way on every platform.
If you ask a typical grad the size of a bool they will inevitably say one bit, but, CPUs and RAM, etc don't work like that, typically they expect WORD sized chunks of memory - meaning that the boolean size of one but becomes a WORD sized chunk, assuming that it hasn't been packed
To be fair, though, I come up short on a lot of things comp sci graduates know.
It's why Andrei Alexandrescu and I made a good team. I was the engineer, and he the scientist. The yin and the yang, so to speak.
And yet even more of a fun time with porting pointer code was going from the various x86 memory models[0] to 32-bit. Depending on the program, the pain was either near, far, or huge... :-D
The integer representation wasn't always two's complement in the early days of computing, so you couldn't even assume that. C++ only required integer representations to be two's complement as of C++20, since the last architectures that don't work this way had effectively been dead for decades.
In that context, an 'int' was supposed to be the native word size of an integer on a given architecture. A long time ago, 'int' was an abstraction over the dozen different bit-widths used in real hardware. In that context, it was an aid to portability.
I suggested to him that he'd have a hard time finding any existing C code that ran correctly on it. After all, how are you going to write a byte to memory if you've only got 32 bit operations?
Anyhow, after 20 years of programming C, I took what I learned and applied it to D. The integral types are specified sizes, and 2's complement.
One might ask, what about 16 bit machines? Instead of trying to define how this would work in official D, I suggested a variant of D where the language rules were adapted to 16 bits. This is not objectively worse than what C does, and it works fine, and the advantage is there is no false pretense of portability.
If the number of bits isn't actually included right in the type name, then be very sure you know what you're doing.
The senior engineer answer to "How many bits are there in an int?" is "No, stop, put that down before you put your eye out!" Which, to be fair, is the senior engineer answer to a lot of things.
On the other, the right answer is 16 or 32. It's not the correct answer, strictly speaking, but it is the right one.