Would making plain int 64-bit break a lot of reaso

Question

Until recently, I'd considered the decision by most systems implementors/vendors to keep plain int 32-bit even on 64-bit machines a sort of expedient wart. With modern C99 fixed-size types (int32_t and uint32_t, etc.) the need for there to be a standard integer type of each size 8, 16, 32, and 64 mostly disappears, and it seems like int could just as well be made 64-bit.

However, the biggest real consequence of the size of plain int in C comes from the fact that C essentially does not have arithmetic on smaller-than-int types. In particular, if int is larger than 32-bit, the result of any arithmetic on uint32_t values has type signed int, which is rather unsettling.

Is this a good reason to keep int permanently fixed at 32-bit on real-world implementations? I'm leaning towards saying yes. It seems to me like there could be a huge class of uses of uint32_t which break when int is larger than 32 bits. Even applying the unary minus or bitwise complement operator becomes dangerous unless you cast back to uint32_t.

Of course the same issues apply to uint16_t and uint8_t on current implementations, but everyone seems to be aware of and used to treating them as "smaller-than-int" types.

Answer 1

"Reasonable Code"...

Well... the thing about development is, you write and fix it and then it works... and then you stop!

And maybe you've been burned a lot so you stay well within the safe ranges of certain features, and maybe you haven't been burned in that particular way so you don't realize that you're relying on something that could kind-of change.

Or even that you're relying on a bug.

On olden Mac 68000 compilers, int was 16 bit and long was 32. But even then most extant C code assumed an int was 32, so typical code you found on a newsgroup wouldn't work. (Oh, and Mac didn't have printf, but I digress.)

So, what I'm getting at is, yes, if you change anything, then some things will break.

Answer 2

While I don't personally write code like this, I'll bet that it's out there in more than one place... and of course it'll break if you change the size of int.

int i, x = getInput();
for (i = 0; i < 32; i++)
{
    if (x & (1 << i))
    {
        //Do something
    }
}