Getting rid of Microsoft specific types

[ghost]

Defines and typedefs such as BOOL, CONST, UINT and DWORD are used pretty much everywhere in the codebase. Most of these defines where introduced a long time ago (BOOL was added before bool was thrown into C++) and now, most of them are meaningless. Nowadays, every decent compiler should support C++'s fundamental types without any problem. Of course, DirectX types and some other funky types (HWND, HHOOK and so on) can't be replaced but there's no excuse for more common types I've pointed out earlier.

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Pros

• Less error-prone (every Microsoft specific type names are upper case)
• Makes high-level parts of the engine less dependent on MSVC / Windows API
• Improves compile/runtime speed and makes debugging tasks easier (BOOL is a int typedef whereas bool is a true type)
• Syntax highlighting / code readability is slightly improved; GitHub syntax highlighter (and probably many others) don't know about BOOL, HANDLE or DWORD but it does its job perfectly well on the standard types.

Cons

• Nothing. Really, I can't think of any drawbacks.

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What to do?

There's nothing hard. We just need to search for these types and replace them by their standard equivalent. If you _really_ have to use a non-standard type in a piece of code, it should be better to keep this code 'away (i.e. not in a header nor in the middle of a high-level source file) To make things easier, here's a table with what should be considered for replacement and their equivalents.

Microsoft types	Standard equivalents	stdint types
INT8	signed char	int8_t
PINT8	signed char *	int8_t *
BYTE / UCHAR / UINT8	unsigned char	uint8_t
LPBYTE / PBYTE	unsigned char *	uint8_t *
INT16 / SHORT	signed short	int16_t
PINT16 / PSHORT	signed short *	int16_t *
USHORT / WORD / UINT16	unsigned short	uint16_t
LPWORD / PWORD	unsigned short *	uint16_t *
INT / INT32 / LONG / LONG32	signed int	int32_t
LPINT / PINT / LPLONG / PLONG / PINT32 /PLONG32 / PLONG	signed int *	int32_t *
DWORD / DWORD32 / UINT / UINT32 / ULONG32 / ULONG	unsigned int	uint32_t
LPDWORD / PDWORD / PDWORD32	unsigned int *	uint32_t *
INT64 / LONGLONG / LONG64	signed long long	int64_t
PINT64 / PLONG64 / PLONGLONG	signed long long *	int64_t *
DWORDLONG / DWORD64 / QWORD / UINT64 / ULONGLONG / ULONG64	unsigned long long	uint64_t
INT_PTR / LONG_PTR	N/A1	intptr_t
DWORD_PTR / UINT_PTR	N/A1	uintptr_t
BOOL / BOOLEAN	bool	N/A
LPBOOL / PBOOL / PBOOLEAN	bool *	N/A
CCHAR / CHAR	char	N/A
LPSTR / PCHAR	char *	N/A
LPCSTR / PCSTR	const char *	N/A
CONST	const	N/A
FLOAT	float	N/A
PFLOAT	float *	N/A
VOID	void	N/A
LPCVOID	const void *	N/A
WCHAR	wchar_t	N/A
LPWSTR / PWSTR / PWCHAR	wchar_t *	N/A
LPCWSTR / PCWSTR	const wchar_t *	N/A

1 - Representation of an integer type for pointer precision

• INT_PTR / LONG_PTR are mapped to a 32-bit signed integer on 32-bits systems and to a 64-bit signed integer on 64-bits systems.
• DWORD_PTR / UINT_PTR are mapped to a 32-bit unsigned integer on 32-bits systems and to a 64-bit unsigned integer on 64-bits systems.

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It's clear that the easiest way to do that would be to use cstdint along with the standard types. Feel free to share anything, any ideas about all this.

[nitrocaster]

That's why it's required by the conventions. Except that I intended to put these types to common engine header.

[ghost]

I've read those conventions but I just wanted to make things a bit more clear about the types already present in the repo. I know that cstdint is C++11 only but it's already present on MSVC and GCC. However, having these type defined in our own header would make them naturally portable (as long as everything is well done)

[BeaconDev]

Hey guys, apologies for chiming in here - SpaceBrain, I've sent you an email on your account linked on GitHub - please let me know if it's not the correct email to contact you on!

[tamlin-mike]

'BOOL' is part of some API contracts, so must stay there since they are part of the ABI.

For non-ABI uses, BOOL should be replaced by "bool".