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Don’t Use Booleans

https://www.luu.io/posts/dont-use-booleans/

by luuio • 7 years ago

2 2 7 years ago

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nwah1• 7 years ago

Surprisingly sensible. I wonder if compiler magic could, in theory, reduce enums that have only two options down to a single bit, but still provide all the type safety guarantees. Or maybe provide another primitive just for that purpose.

Particularly with a new primitive, you could literally have a language that just doesn't allow you to define generic booleans.

luuio• 7 years ago

At the bare metal layer, most booleans are actually transported around as `int` (or WORD size), so there's no real performance benefit to compressing things down to one bit, other than if you really need to save 7 bits in physical storage.

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