On 05/17/2017 06:59 PM, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 5:05 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhag...@alum.mit.edu> > wrote: > > Now this would want to have some selling words for it? > I do not see an advantage of this patch as-is. > > I mean technically we don't need a sign, so we use that extra bit > to be able to process transactions up to twice the size. But I doubt > that is the real reason. I'll read on, maybe a later patch will explain > why we do this here.
The reason to use `size_t` is not signedness but rather that it might be larger than `int` (e.g., 64 vs 32 bits), so you could theoretically get an integer overflow otherwise. It's unlikely here, because it would be hard to initiate an update of more than (2³¹-1) references in a single update, but it's good hygiene anyway. I'll mention that in the commit message. Michael
