Comment by spacedcowboy

So, writing xc [1], I took the opposite approach, but the real reason for that was more cross-platform compatibility - xc compiles for Mac(M series), Win64, Linux (x86_64), iOS, Android, WASM, m68k, Arm A9, and 6502. The basic types in xc are spelt {u,i}{8,16,32,64} and since the platforms covered range through 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit machines, being explicit about the size of the data-structure was a lot more useful than it being implied.

I can see the argument for "an int works on the natural machine size". But it starts getting a lot more complicated when you have structs - suddenly byte positions are very important (as is 'sizeof' :), and if you're running the same code on different platforms, and using pointers to access them, well you need to be careful...

Fixed-size types (and we've more or less given up on non-power-of-2 sized primitive types) force you to think about the size of the type you're using at the point of creation, and if you really do want 'an int is the size of the local machine', you're free to 'typedef u32 int;' in a platform-specific file - I deliberately did not use 'int', 'short', 'long' etc. in the language.

[1] https://compile-xc.org/compiler/language/types/