portable way to deal with 64/32 bit time_t

Question

I have some code which is built both on Windows and Linux. Linux at this point is always 32bit but Windows is 32 and 64bit. Windows wants to have time_t be 64 bit and Linu

Answer 1

My favourite way of handling with the issue is:

1. Re-define time_t and use the redefined time_t everywhere instead of unsigned long long etc.:

#define  time_t  intmax_t  /* Or unsigned long long int, int64_t etc. */

2. Use strftime every time that you want to convert the timestamp to a string instead of relying on format strings. Format strings are unreliable, and overflow/underflow errors in format strings are often painful to debug, and hard to find while doing static analysis.

A time will come however when most of the Unix system and compilers out there must converge towards a 64-bit time_t. At least, I hope that that time comes before 2038.