Comment by pjmlp

Is that really that much of a big deal, though? Before stdint, if one needed that level of accuracy, one would do your own equivalent of stdinit by hand, and adjust those definitions when porting to another compiler/platform. The same goes for your local boolean type.

I think the only real annoyance is that each programmer/team did it with their own convention (I32, INT32, i32, int32, WORD, Word bool, BOOL, Bool, etc., etc.); standardizing helps with putting everyone on the same page more than it helps porting. It doesn't prevent people from reverse-typedef-ing standard names to local "dialectal" names, though.

But I also think that one should only rarely use raw integer types, in an ideal world; the elephant in the room is that typedef is kind of the second "billion dollars mistake" [1]. C is a weakly typed language and there's no practical way to undo it (besides transpilation), so there's double no point to leave behind raw types.

[1] For those not too familiar with C, typedef defines a "type alias", not a type: https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/typedef

C99 kinda fixed that with the `(u)int_leastN_t` types (which are hardly used in practice though). And shame that it took Microsoft 16 years to even start supporting C99 though so we were basically forced to keep using our own custom integer typedefs long after the C standard had fixed the issue.

I thought most implementations of C have stdint (intN_t, leastN_t and fastN_t etc).