dusk bramble
It's very early days for this project of mine, and so it's lacking a lot of features, but I wanted to get feedback on how I'm doing so far with the library design.
The GitHub README should hopefully explain everything, although if something is unclear, please lmk and I'll clarify.
https://github.com/KojoBailey/binary-cpp-library
Here be the header file for those too lazy to go through GitHub (it's only a single file)
You'll notice it's very short since I'm yet to add many features like writing, hashing, etc.
coarse grove
Why char though and not unsigned char or std::byte?
dusk bramble
Why `char` though and not `unsigned char` or `std::byte`?
what does unsigned char do even
std::byte seems useful though
will switch, thanks
coarse grove
what does `unsigned char` do even
it's an unsigned integral type of size char
it's basically the recommended type for arbitrary binary data
craggy yoke
but why does the signage matter
you'd be surprised to find out that char is a distinct type from both unsigned char and signed char, and that the signedness of char itself is implementation-defined
it's easier to reason about the decimal values of a byte going from 0 to 255 (range of unsigned char) rather than from -128 to 127 (range of signed char), so why risk it if char happens to be signed on your platform
anyway that's how the rationale goes
std::byte clears that up by being unambiguous about it: you're dealing with a bunch of bits which do not hold any meaning beyond their bit values
what this means is that you're pretty restricted about what you can do with a std::byte, it boils down to bitwise operations, and most notably that does not include arithmetic operations
(it's also a C++20 feature)
dusk bramble
you'd be surprised to find out that `char` is a distinct type from both `unsign...
sorry sorry my dumbass confused signedness and endianness again
dusk bramble
`std::byte` clears that up by being unambiguous about it: you're dealing with a ...
i tried using it, but it’s kinda difficult to do any operations with it
have to cast to unsigned char a lot
so yeah, like you said
rancid fjord
(it's also a C++20 feature)
std::byte is C++17
rancid fjord
i tried using it, but it’s kinda difficult to do any operations with it
that's intentional
well, some of it is unintentional; there are cases where std::byte is artificially inconvenient, like initialization
dusk bramble
see also https://stackoverflow.com/q/77097673/5740428
will do, thanks 
cinder crag