I agree with the article of course. I think most confusion comes not having learned about the purpose of having them be defined based on the architecture in the first place. It took me a long time before I stumbled upon how they really worked and why, because while I started it was either x86 or nothing. When x64 showed up, suddenly it became relevant and everybody started learning about C types more in depth as they ran into issues with sizeof.
Also, misuse in data protocols is where I think the bad reputation of the flexible type sizes came from. stdint was desperately needed for that reason and it came a bit late.
C would probably not have survived unless it had this flexibility.
But its not justa historical thing. Today there are modern platforms like DSPs that have 32bit sized char, because that is the smallest addressable type. These platforms depend on C for tool chains, even if most "portable" C wont run correctly on them. The fact that you can build hardware like that, and not have to invent a new language / dialect to program them is a huge win for the world.
<edit> I didnt see the footnote about DSPs at first read </edit>
Shouldn't they be 64 bits on most modern systems then?
But porting 32-bit code to 64-bit was a big deal back then, and C99 with its new fixed-width integer types overlapped with the first AMD64 CPUs (and Microsoft's MSVC didn't start to support C99 until around 2015 anyway), I guess keeping int on 32-bits in the popular compilers was deemed 'safer' for porting existing code. I guess we can already be lucky that all the big compilers agreed on the same int width.
Nonetheless, I started to use C for programming only in 1990, when I got access to the Microsoft C and Borland Turbo C compilers.
At that time, 36 years ago, the C flexible integer sizes were already obsolete.
Since that time until now, while using C on a great variety of computers, from servers and workstations to the smallest microcontrollers, I have seen plenty of portability problems created by the existence of the flexible integer sizes.
The only programs that had no portability problems were those that never used the flexible integer sizes, but only integers with a definite size, e.g. 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit or 64-bit.
While sizeof solves the problems of memory allocation or copying, it does not help much in preventing unexpected integer overflows, because writing code with multiple paths that would check or prevent overflow for different integer sizes is cumbersome.
gustavopezzi•17h ago
enriquto•49m ago
would like to learn some tricks, like configuring gcc so that int is 64 bits, and so on