I’m working through the vulkan tutorial and came across GLFW_TRUE and GLFW_FALSE. I presume there’s a good reason but in looking at the docs it’s just defining 1 and 0, so I’m sorta at a loss as to why some libraries do this (especially in cpp?).
Tangentially related is having things like vk_result which is a struct that stores an enum full of integer codes.
Wouldn’t it be easier to replace these variables with raw int codes or in the case of GLFW just 1 and 0?
Coming mostly from C, and having my caps lock bound to escape for vim, the amount of all caps variables is arduous for my admittedly short fingers.
Anyway hopefully one of you knows why libraries do this thanks!
GLFW is a C library, not a C++ one, and an old one at that, and so the reason is that a long time ago, there was no bool in C. Every library would make their own true and false bc it’s handy to have.
Nowadays, the type _Bool has been added to C, and C++ has built-in bool, but you can still see the legacy of no boolean in C as to use the type name “bool” as well as the key words “true” and “false” for 1 and 0, you have to include “stdbool.h,” as well as in custom types in these old GL-adjacent libraries.
I work with young people starting out in IT, so I’m used to getting screenshots, and I’m so used to screenshots made with a phone instead of just capturing the screen, that I’ve stopped complaining… But come on! At least evaluate the result of the first picture and maybe do another if it’s illegible.
My brain is so used to seeing political content that I read “why do liberals define their own true and false” and was already like “what kind of shit take am I going to have fun reading today”
I can give you a shit take if you want one, but I don’t have shiitake mushrooms.
i just like namespacing my variables anyway so there’s no chance of any conflicts and so you can easily change something one place instead of everywhere
This is often done for backward compatibility, as stdbool.h which provides true and false wasn’t standard before C99 and even though that’s more than 25 years ago now a lot of old habits die hard.
stdbool.h (along with float.h, limits.h, stdarg.h, stddef.h, stdint.h, and some other library facilities) is required to be provided even in freestanding environment so, at least as long as you use an ISO C conformant compiler, you can always include those even if you don’t have a libc implementation
Yeah in the late 90’s I was coding in C++ and I’m pretty sure I had to define true and false manually.
