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P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte (wg21.link)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A new proposal for C/C++ to force bytes to be 8 bits wide

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.

This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as "bytes." These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++... and whether modern C++ cares about them.