I used to be a good citizen and used size_t for all my buffer sizes, data sizes, memory allocation sizes, etc but I have abandoned that completely.
If my program needs to support >4GB sizes I need 64-bit always, makes no sense to pretend "size_t data_size" could be anything else, and if it doesn't need to support that, using 8 byte size_t on 64-bit machines makes to sense either, just wasting memory/cache line space for no reason.
If my program needs to support >4GB sizes I need 64-bit always, makes no sense to pretend "size_t data_size" could be anything else, and if it doesn't need to support that, using 8 byte size_t on 64-bit machines makes to sense either, just wasting memory/cache line space for no reason.