You can’t read one byte
lol what. You can absolutely read one byte: https://godbolt.org/z/TeTch8Yhd
On ARM it's ldrb (load register byte), and on RISC-V it's lb (load byte).
Every decent compiler will turn booleans into words.
No compiler I know of does this. I think you might be getting confused because they're loaded into registers which are machine-word sized. But in memory a bool is always one byte.
I’m guessing there’s a reason they wanted min() to be able to be called without any arguments but I’m sure it isn’t a good one.
It not a totally unreasonable definition. For example it preserves nice properties like min(a.concat(b)) == min([min(a), min(b)]).
Obviously the correct thing to do is to return an optional type, like Rust does. But ... yeah I mean considering the other footguns in Javascript (e.g. the insane implicit type coersion) I'd say they didn't do too badly here.
Completely wrong. I'm hoping this was a joke... :-D
You can't store data in parity bits... so it's irrelevant.
It's not just less memory though - it might also introduce spurious data dependencies, e.g. to store a bit you now need to also read the old value of the byte that it's in.
I don't think so. Apart from dynamically typed languages which need to store the type with the value, it's always 1 byte, and that doesn't depend on architecture (excluding ancient or exotic architectures) or optimisation flags.
Which language/architecture/flags would not store a bool in 1 byte?
No it isn't. All statically typed languages I know of use a byte. Which languages store it in an entire 32 bits? That would be unnecessarily wasteful.
Well there are containers that store booleans in single bits (e.g. std::vector<bool> - which was famously a big mistake).
But in the general case you don't want that because it would be slower.
The biggest problem is that each element doesn't have a unique memory address; iterators aren't just pointers.