alt Hacker News> 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types
That's likely thanks to C which goes to great pains to not specify the size of the basic types. For example, for 64 bit architectures, "long" is 32 bits on the Mac and 64 bits everywhere else.
The net result of that is I never use C "long", instead using "int" and "long long".
This mess is why D has 32 bit ints and 64 bit longs, whether it's a 32 bit machine or a 64 bit machine. The result was we haven't had porting problems with integer sizes.
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It's substantially worse on the JVM. One's intuition from C just fails when you have to think about references vs primitives, and the overhead of those (with or without compressed OOPs).
I've met very few folks who understand the overheads involved, and how extreme the benefits can be from avoiding those.
That's a reasonable answer. But, I meant they seemed to have little understanding or interest. I don't interview much, and I'm probably a poor interviewer. But, I guess I was expecting some discussion.
Even more fun is pointers, especially when windows / macos were switching from 32-bits to 64-bits (in different ways).