Type size_t is well know to C++ programmers. It is an alias for whichever unsigned integer type capable of representing the size of the largest possible object in the target environment. Depending on the target, size_t might be unsigned, unsigned long, or unsigned long long.

There is another type frequently used by C programmers - ssize_t. From its name, it represents a signed size_t. Unfortunately, it is not part of C standard. C standard library provides another types, ptrdiff_t for this purpose - although on the first glance, the two looks quite different.

ssize_t is not defined in VC++ (at least in VC 8.0). It is available in GCC.  If a library is written using this type, it will compile OK under gcc, but not under msc. For this reason, many library has the following code (or similar):

#if !defined(ssize_t)
#define ssize_t long
#endif

Now comes the problem - if you have two such libraries defining ssize_t, you may run into problem when you include header files from both libraries. Worse, some libraries use typedef to define this type, and two typedefs (or one define) conflict each other.

The suggestion here is not to use this ssize_t as it is non-standard. Use ptrdiff_t instead.