Re: [HACKERS] Size vs size_t

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2017-03-16 17:24:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> The short answer to that is that "Size" predates the universal acceptance
>> of size_t.  If we were making these decisions today, or anytime since the
>> early 2000s, we'd surely have just gone with size_t.  But it wasn't a
>> realistic option in the 90s.

> Just out of curiosity I checked when we switched to backing Size with
> size_t:
> 1998 - 0ad5d2a3a886e72b429ea2b84bfcb36c0680f84d

Yeah.  We inherited the previous definition (as "unsigned int") from
Berkeley.  I wasn't involved then, of course, but I follow their reasoning
perfectly because I remember fighting the same type of portability battles
with libjpeg in the early 90s.  "size_t" was invented by the ANSI C
committee (hence, 1989 or 1990) and had only very haphazard penetration
until the late 90s.  If you wanted to write portable code you couldn't
depend on it.
        regards, tom lane