> Losing all stale unprocessed data and leaving a ready empty buffer behind is often the desired outcome.

Yeah, the Type 3 example could conceivably make it so that you intermix old and new data if you overflow, rather than just dumping a whole buffer.

Especially when your full() function checks for exact equality, like the one in the article does.

And if you remove the asserts, and then somehow underflow? God help you. You'll be pulling 4 billion entries you never actually stored out of the buffer, just repeating previously stored garbage over and over.

> Type 3 is probably banned on most codebases because of the integer overflow.

Not only this, but the purported code reduction benefits associated with type 3 are only superficial, and won't actually appear in any assembly listing.