I am working on a Solidity smart contract and am considering the use of uint and int data types for memory variables. I have specific use-cases like reverse looping, where using int seems to produce cleaner code.
My questions are:
uint and int in terms of computational cost and gas consumption?The main difference between uint and int is that uint only accepts positive values, while int accepts positive and negative values. They both store a 256-bit size value and as such, have the same storage cost.
The gas cost would vary depending on the operations you will make. Generally speaking gas cost may be higher for int if negative numbers are involved because handling negative numbers in smart contracts can be more complex.
To summarize, uint is often preferred for cases where you want to ensure that a variable is always non-negative, while for doing arithmetic operations, int is better.
uint256 allows for the range [0, 2^256 - 1], in int256 1 bit is to indicate sign bit(+/-) and the remaining 255 bits represent the unsigned part(absolute value) which can give you a range of 2^255 values so for an int256 the negative range is [-2^255, -1] and the positive range is [0, 2^255 -1]