I don't entirely understand why 'int' is the new 'short' here; int hasn't been a particularly good way to store sizes since C99.
Good spot though; I kind of doubt that this was a conscience design decision and probably just a slip up.
Good spot though; I kind of doubt that this was a conscience design decision and probably just a slip up.
And agreed, good catch.
And here we have a prime example of Chrome, a major cross-platform project with high visibility that is not using these types nor didn't define their own in this case. These types were intended to help reduce mistakes. But compiler fragmentation basically resulted in organizations avoiding it, leading to these types of mistakes that could have been avoided in the first place.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but to me it seems like this is saying go ahead and use the fixed size variants whenever, but it is still OK to use int when you need <=32 bits.
"<stdint.h> defines types like int16_t, uint32_t, int64_t, etc. You should always use those in preference to short, unsigned long long and the like, when you need a guarantee on the size of an integer. Of the C integer types, only int should be used."
Still, at least nowadays there is no excuse -- everything from TI to VC++ supports stdint variations.
In any case, it isn't as if the language doesn't allow for type alias.
EDIT: looking at the documentation, it appears that __int8 is supposed to always be an alias for `char`, even as far back as 2003: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/29dh1w7z(v=vs.71).a.... However, the workaround found in msinttypes suggests that Visual Studio 6 does have this problem. I weep for those still using it.