> There is no clear point where the development community made a collective decision to move away from the magic-number practice; it just sort of faded away. The are probably a few reasons behind this change. The kernel community has, for many years now, tried to use type-safe interfaces rather than passing void pointers around, making it less likely that the wrong structure type will be passed into a function. Developers spend less time staring at hex dumps of data, preferring more structured output, tracepoints, and interactive debuggers as ways of tracking down problems. Debugging features in the kernel's memory allocators mean that many sorts of memory-corruption issues will be caught directly. Magic numbers are just not as helpful as they once were.

I'd be interested in specific examples of some ways that type safety has been improved. Or does the author say that there is less of a need for the kind of "type safety" that magic numbers provide because problems will be caught in other ways - by more generic kernel code? If so I'd still be interested in some examples.