I've been reading some code which uses gtk+ and I've encountered types like gboolean and gunichar.
As long as I can understand the point of using gunichar instead of wchar_t (glib gunichar and wchar_t), I can't really understand the point of using gboolean instead of bool.
gboolean instead of bool? Is there something more than just being careful about the code style consistency?It wouldn't be so weird to me if it were used for a general consistency (if one decides to use GLib, one'll prefer to use types defined there). However the author of that code uses int instead of gint. Is the author just being careless?
Just to add more details (official GLib as a reference):
gunichar is defined as typedef guint32 gunichar
guint32 is defined as typedef unsigned int guint32
gboolean is defined as typedef gint gboolean
gint is defined as typedef int gint
Uniformity and maintainability. If at a certain point in future a new utf8char type is introduced, it will only be a matter of changing the typedef and recompiling, without having to go through thousands of lines of code to patch every single usage.
Also consider that GLib is meant to work on a wide range of compilers, not all fully compliant with the latest specs. For instance, the availability of bool, wchar_t and fixed-size types cannot be assumed, since they all came with C99 and C11. Furthermore, GLib development began in 1998 (as you can see from the contributors graph), when C99 was still in draft and those features weren't even standard.