It’s time to end the hate (for bool)

[JimB123]

Can anyone explain why we continue to persecute the lowly bool?

The boolean type was formally added in C99 (25 years ago!). Yes, it required a special header, but so do a lot of things. As of C23, bool is a first class type, using reserved words for bool/true/false. Yet bool continues to be discriminated against in Valkey.

Booleans are more readable and expressive. When there’s an int representing 0/1/false/true - a reader never really knows for sure that it’s ALWAYS 0/1 (or even that 0/1 necessarily represent false/true). A boolean conveys a clear intent - AND THE COMPILER ENFORCES IT.

I’ve heard people say “We don’t use bool because <insert name> doesn’t like bool”. But should we give into peer pressure and join the haters? I say NO!

This is Valkey now. It’s a brave new world. Let’s shed the shackles of “bool hate”. Rise up and be a force for love in the world!

Let’s face it, we use goto all over the place - and that’s the evil construct that our computer science instructors all warned us about. We use other C99 additions like inline functions and long long. We use enum. Is it somehow more palatable to do this?

typedef enum {notABool_False=0, notABool_True=1} NotABool;  // Just silliness

As one of the few people here who was actually using C before C99, I say enough is enough.

‘Cause the good old days weren’t always good.
And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.
- Billy Joel

[zuiderkwast]

The only logical explanation I've heard is that if you're blindly replacing int with bool, it can have some side effect because sizeof(bool) != sizeof(int). If we're just aware of that, then it won't be a problem IMHO.

@valkey-io/core-team I marked this as a major decision. Let's vote about it. ( 👍 / 👎 )

[enjoy-binbin]

i don't mind doing this, the only painful thing for me just the git blame and the git conflict, but we already done a lot of formatting and refactoring things.

[JimB123]

Note that I'm NOT recommending replacing int with bool. I'm just recommending that we stop saying "hey, don't use bool" in our code reviews. Designs shouldn't be limited to using int when a bool is the logically correct.

I'm also not recommending blindly casting between int/bool.

Just start using bool when it's appropriate to do so.

[hwware]

I do some research on it (Because I have no experience using bool in C), I think we can use it in Valkey, but we need to do review more carefully on it. Ref: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/291771/what-was-the-reason-for-the-creation-of-boolean-variables and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309008

[hwware]

Note that I'm NOT recommending replacing int with bool. I'm just recommending that we stop saying "hey, don't use bool" in our code reviews. Designs shouldn't be limited to using int when a bool is the logically correct.

I'm also not recommending blindly casting between int/bool.

Just start using bool when it's appropriate to do so.

yes, we can not just simply replace int with bool, we need to care about the logic first.

[zuiderkwast]

The majority of TSC have voted for it, so consider this accepted.