What is size_t in C?

Question

I am getting confused with size_t in C. I know that it is returned by the sizeof operator. But what exactly is it? Is it a data type?

Let's say I have a for loop:

for(i = 0; i < some_size; i++)

Should I use int i; or size_t i;?

Answer 1

The manpage for types.h says:

size_t shall be an unsigned integer type

Answer 2

In general, if you are starting at 0 and going upward, always use an unsigned type to avoid an overflow taking you into a negative value situation. This is critically important, because if your array bounds happens to be less than the max of your loop, but your loop max happens to be greater than the max of your type, you will wrap around negative and you may experience a segmentation fault (SIGSEGV). So, in general, never use int for a loop starting at 0 and going upwards. Use an unsigned.

Answer 3

Since nobody has yet mentioned it, the primary linguistic significance of size_t is that the sizeof operator returns a value of that type. Likewise, the primary significance of ptrdiff_t is that subtracting one pointer from another will yield a value of that type. Library functions that accept it do so because it will allow such functions to work with objects whose size exceeds UINT_MAX on systems where such objects could exist, without forcing callers to waste code passing a value larger than "unsigned int" on systems where the larger type would suffice for all possible objects.

Answer 4

If you are the empirical type,

echo | gcc -E -xc -include 'stddef.h' - | grep size_t

Output for Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit GCC 4.8:

typedef long unsigned int size_t;

Note that stddef.h is provided by GCC and not glibc under src/gcc/ginclude/stddef.h in GCC 4.2.

Interesting C99 appearances

• malloc takes size_t as an argument, so it determines the maximum size that may be allocated.

  And since it is also returned by sizeof, I think it limits the maximum size of any array.

  See also: What is the maximum size of an array in C?

Answer 5

size_t is unsigned integer data type. On systems using the GNU C Library, this will be unsigned int or unsigned long int. size_t is commonly used for array indexing and loop counting.

Answer 6

size_t and int are not interchangeable. For instance on 64-bit Linux size_t is 64-bit in size (i.e. sizeof(void*)) but int is 32-bit.

Also note that size_t is unsigned. If you need signed version then there is ssize_t on some platforms and it would be more relevant to your example.

As a general rule I would suggest using int for most general cases and only use size_t/ssize_t when there is a specific need for it (with mmap() for example).