> 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types

That's likely thanks to C which goes to great pains to not specify the size of the basic types. For example, for 64 bit architectures, "long" is 32 bits on the Mac and 64 bits everywhere else.

The net result of that is I never use C "long", instead using "int" and "long long".

This mess is why D has 32 bit ints and 64 bit longs, whether it's a 32 bit machine or a 64 bit machine. The result was we haven't had porting problems with integer sizes.

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switchbak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's substantially worse on the JVM. One's intuition from C just fails when you have to think about references vs primitives, and the overhead of those (with or without compressed OOPs).

I've met very few folks who understand the overheads involved, and how extreme the benefits can be from avoiding those.

	▲	Quarrelsome 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Conversely I've met many folks who come into managed environments and piss away time trying to wrangle the managed system into how they think it should work, instead of accepting that clever people wrote it and guidelines when followed result in acceptable outcomes. The sort of insane stuff I've seen on the dotnet repo where people are trying to tear apart the entire type system just because they think they've cracked some secret performance code.

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afpx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a reasonable answer. But, I meant they seemed to have little understanding or interest. I don't interview much, and I'm probably a poor interviewer. But, I guess I was expecting some discussion.

	▲	WalterBright 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I ran into some comp sci graduates in the early 80's who did not know what a "register" was. To be fair, though, I come up short on a lot of things comp sci graduates know. It's why Andrei Alexandrescu and I made a good team. I was the engineer, and he the scientist. The yin and the yang, so to speak.