Advice on unsigned int (Gangnam Style edition)

Question

The video \"Gangnam Style\" (I\'m sure you\'ve heard it) just exceeded 2 billion views on youtube. In fact, Google says that they never expected a video to be greater than a 32-

Answer 1

You specific question is:

"Is it bad practice to use unsigned?" to which the only correct answer can be no. It is not bad practice.

There are many style guides, each with a different focus, and while in some cases, an organisation, given their typical toolchain and deployment platform may choose not to use unsigned for their products, other toolchains and platforms almost demand it's use.

Google seem to get a lot of deference because they have a good business model (and probably employ some smart people like everyone else).

CERT IIRC recommend unsigned for buffer indexes, because if you do overflow, at least you'll still be in your own buffer, some intrinsic security there.

What do the language and standard library designers say (probably the best representation of accepted wisdom). strlen returns a size_t, which is probably unsigned (platform dependent), other answers suggest this is an anachronism because shiny new computers have wide architectures, but this misses the point that C and C++ are general programming languages and should scale well on big and small platforms.

Bottom line is that this is one of many religious questions; certainly not settled, and in these cases, I normally go with my religion for green field developments, and go with the existing convention of the codebase for existing work. Consistency matters.