Portable C++ Types

LibSDL (version 1.2) was chosen as the primary platform abstraction layer for reasons of its widespread portability and open source nature. What is meant by "primary" is that SDL is not the only option for platform abstraction. The Pal interface provides a means to port Xrb to various other platforms with relative ease.

Originally there was no Pal interface, and Xrb used SDL directly, and therefore used its integer types. The types are

• Sint8 - 8 bit, signed integer
• Uint8 - 8 bit, unsigned integer
• Sint16 - 16 bit, signed integer
• Uint16 - 16 bit, unsigned integer
• Sint32 - 32 bit, signed integer
• Uint32 - 32 bit, unsigned integer

These typedefs reside within the Xrb namespace (xrb_types.hpp) so as not collide with any innocient integer type bystanders.

After Pal was introduced and SDL's offensive presence hidden away behind its unassuming facade, the use of SDL's integer types was considered too pervasive to change (and besides, I liked their names), so the names were kept. If SDLPal is used as the Pal implementation, then SDL's integer types are used. Otherwise the stdint.h types intXX_t and uintXX_t are used.

See xrb_types.hpp for more information (in other words, look at the code yourself).