int vs ssize_t and u-inst vs size_t

[Nusret Taşçı]

Hi,

When compiling wxWidgets for x64 with VS2005, I get 469 warnings which 
look like:
conversion from 'size_t' to 'int', possible loss of data.
So I thought that this would be a great opportunity to fix these 
warnings and contribute to the project.

Unfortunately only a few of these warnings are _very_ local, like:

int i = aString.length();
return i>bString.length();

While the 32 bit compiler doesn't warn about that, the 64 bit one does.
These kind of warnings are fixable, and I guess no one will argue 
against fixing them.

Some of these local type of warnings require understanding of followup 
code, because this signed/unsigned conversion may influence following 
calculations. Fixing these may result in broken code - I don't have the 
heart to change these kind of warnings.

For the other warnings - for the greatest part of the warnings, it would 
be required to change function declarations, which may require to fix 
derived classes (and samples).
For example: ..\..\include\wx/richtext/richtextbuffer.h declares a lot 
of input/output values and member variables as long or int. For example 
GetParagraphCount() returns a signed int where I'd say that it should 
return size_t.

While continuing with my observations I concluded that even a lot of 
very basic and 'old' classes would need a change.
wxString::Find() returns int, while find() returns size_t. There are 
some other functions similar to Find() which should return size_t instead.

And when I finally saw that wxSize uses 'int' for 'x' and 'y', I decided 
to write this eMail and ask the wx-developers to please use ssize_t and 
size_t more often (and where appropriate) as they're IMHO more - well 
more portable maybe? Changing wxSize to use ssize_t would be ideal, but 
I guess the risk to break existing code on not so common compilers may 
be too big, so I don't dare to ask.

Is there anything I can do to 'fix' these warnings in CVS_HEAD? I'd post 
the buildlog with linenumbers etc, but it's 39k in size, it may be too 
big for this list.
There are 2 other possible solutions for these warnings. C-style-cast 
them or ignore them. I hope no one considers this to be a real option.

On the other hand, it's up to you to ignore this and let me live with my 
size_t fetish. ;)


Regards,
Nusi