At work the current thing I’m doing is converting all instances of ‘long’ to ‘int32_t’ in a section of the codebase. Even though these data types are actually identical, because the C specification from the 60s doesn’t actually specify the length of int, short, and long, the compiler can’t just plug a long into a function that takes an int32_t or vice-versa.

So I’m also having to make the same change in the other parts of the codebase that CALL the code I’m changing.

Which is very annoying because, again, these two data types are identical.

But, whatever. It’s mostly just a lot of building, going to the error message, fixing the call site that the error points towards, build again. Tedious, but easy.

But if the problem is with a template function? Go fuck yourself, Visual Studio says!

Somewhere in the codebase, some thing is calling this function with the wrong types. Where? Who knows! Figure it out yourself, chuckles!

Got to directly inspect everywhere that calls this function to see if you can find the one that’s got a long in the arguments. Or a different data type that is being converted to a long.

In one case I had to resort to commenting out different combinations of function calls until the error message disappeared

And then once I knew where the problem was, work backwards from there to figure out WHAT it was