What's the advantage of using GLuint instead of unsigned int?

Question

I like to be more standard as possible, so why should I \"constrain\" my classes defining it\'s members as OpenGL types when I can use primitive types? Is there any advantag

Answer 1

The advantages has already been mentioned here. However, there is a disadvantage clear from the following examples:

class FileIn
    {
    public:
        //Public interface like read
    private:
        void* handle;
    };

The above code fits very well in a platform independent header but writing

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include 

class FileIn
    {
    public:
        //Public interface like read
    private:
        HANDLE handle;
    };

does not.

Though the former will require ugly typecasts like

int fd=(int)( (size_t)handle );
close(fd);

i do not know any system which have sizeof(void*) < sizeof(int). Yes it will fail if open returns a negative number for a valid file handle.

What to learn about this? Avoid using typedefs in library include files. Instead use struct declarations even though C programmers need to write struct a dozen times. Here, some C standard library implementations do it all wrong.

Right

In stdio.h:

struct FILE;

And in the application:

struct FILE* the_file=fopen("filename.txt","rb");
/*...*/

Wrong

In stdio.h:

typedef struct SOMENAMETHATNOONESHOULDUSE
    {
    /* Internal data members */
    } FILE;

In application

FILE* the_file=fopen("filename.txt","rb");

When writing a C++ wrapper, this forces either #include or simply declare the handle as above.