Comment by thayne

> in C it's hard to say reliably define this int is 64-bit wide

That isn't really a problem any more (since c99). You can define it as uint64_t.

But we have a ton of existing APIs that are defined using the wobbly types, so we're kind of stuck with it. And even new APIs use the wobbly types because the author didn't use that for whatever reason.

But that is far from the only issue.

128 bit ints is definitely a problem though, you don't even get agreement between different compilers on the same os on the same hardware.