Usage of int64 as return

[a31amit]

First, Thanks for this cool library!

Question / Problem Statment :

I was trying to use this library to get starting offset values of partitions inside disk image from partition.GetStart()

func (p *Partition) GetStart() int64 {
	_, lss := p.sectorSizes()
	return int64(p.Start) * int64(lss)
}

I am not sure if I fully understand this or identifying a potential problem here due to the return value is int64 which could have negative integer numbers. However when working with partitions, If I understand correctly, cannot have a negative starting point and the minimum starting point is 0 so should not this be the return of uint64?

PS: I am a newbie in golang world. I could have missed something to understand.

[deitch]

You are correct, and if it were up to me, those would be uint64. However, most of the basic golang disk utilities work off of int64, e.g. see File.ReadtAt() or fs.FileInfo or any of dozens of others.

I believe those came because the underlying C calls use long for the most part, e.g. fseek. It just made sense to stick with what people have.

[a31amit]

Make sense, thanks for explaining.