stdint

Portability issues

Data types may cause portability issues of code when compiler changes.

One compiler may consider the integer data type as 2 bytes, another compiler may consider it as 4 bytes or even 8 bytes.

In the "C" programming language the most commonly used data types int and long cause portability issues. This is because the storage size for int and long type are not defined within the C standard (C90 or C99).

The compiler vendors have the choice to define the storage size for the variable depending solely on hardware capabilities of the target platform, with respect to the minimum widths defined by the standard.

To avoid this, we need to make use of data types where their size is explicit in their name. So we know exactly how much data is being allocated for each variable.

The stdint.h header defines integer types with specified widths. It provides sets of typedefs for exact-width integer types, along with defined minimum and maximum allowable values for each type. These types are useful for writing more portable code. ^[1]