Should I use int or Int32

Question

In C#, int and Int32 are the same thing, but I've read a number of times that int is preferred over Int32 with no reason given. Is there a reason, and should I care?

Answer 1

I know that the best practice is to use int, and all MSDN code uses int. However, there's not a reason beyond standardisation and consistency as far as I know.

Answer 2

Some compilers have different sizes for int on different platforms (not C# specific)

Some coding standards (MISRA C) requires that all types used are size specified (i.e. Int32 and not int).

It is also good to specify prefixes for different type variables (e.g. b for 8 bit byte, w for 16 bit word, and l for 32 bit long word => Int32 lMyVariable)

You should care because it makes your code more portable and more maintainable.

Portable may not be applicable to C# if you are always going to use C# and the C# specification will never change in this regard.

Maintainable ihmo will always be applicable, because the person maintaining your code may not be aware of this particular C# specification, and miss a bug were the int occasionaly becomes more than 2147483647.

In a simple for-loop that counts for example the months of the year, you won't care, but when you use the variable in a context where it could possibly owerflow, you should care.

You should also care if you are going to do bit-wise operations on it.

Answer 3

As already stated, int = Int32. To be safe, be sure to always use int.MinValue/int.MaxValue when implementing anything that cares about the data type boundaries. Suppose .NET decided that int would now be Int64, your code would be less dependent on the bounds.

Answer 4

Also consider Int16. If you need to store an Integer in memory in your application and you are concerned about the amount of memory used, then you could go with Int16 since it uses less memeory and has a smaller min/max range than Int32 (which is what int is.)

Answer 5

ECMA-334:2006 C# Language Specification (p18):

Each of the predefined types is shorthand for a system-provided type. For example, the keyword int refers to the struct System.Int32. As a matter of style, use of the keyword is favoured over use of the complete system type name.

Answer 6

You should not care in most programming languages, unless you need to write very specific mathematical functions, or code optimized for one specific architecture... Just make sure the size of the type is enough for you (use something bigger than an Int if you know you'll need more than 32-bits for example)