stdint

If you want to use Qt , you have to embrace quint8 , quint16 and so forth. If you want to use GLib , you have to welcome guint8 , guint16 and so forth. On Linux there are u32 , s16 and so forth. uC/OS defines SINT32 , UINT16 and so forth. And if you have to use some combination of those things, you better be prepared for trouble. Because on your machine u32 will be typedef d over long and quint32 will be typedef d over int and the compiler will complain . Why does everybody do this, if there is <stdint.h> ? Is this some kind of tradition for libraries? Edward Karak stdint.h didn't exist back

What is the difference between stdint.h and inttypes.h? If none of them is used, uint64_t is not recognized but with either of them it is a defined type. See the wikipedia article for inttypes.h. Use stdint.h for a minimal set of definitions; use inttypes.h if you also need portable support for these in printf, scanf, et al. stdint.h Including this file is the "minimum requirement" if you want to work with the specified-width integer types of C99 (i.e. "int32_t", "uint16_t" etc.). If you include this file, you will get the definitions of these types , so that you will be able to use these

I already know that stdint is used to when you need specific variable sizes for portability between platforms. I don't really have such an issue for now, but what are the cons and pros of using it besides the already shown fact above? Looking for this on stackoverflow and others sites, I found 2 links that treats about the theme: codealias.info - this one talks about the portability of the stdint. stackoverflow - this one is more specific about uint8_t . These two links are great specially if one is looking to know more about the main reason of this header - portability . But for me, what I

I'm under the same impression as this answer , that size_t is always guaranteed by the standard to be large enough to hold the largest possible type of a given system. However, this code fails to compile on gcc/Mingw: #include <stdint.h> #include <stddef.h> typedef uint8_t array_t [SIZE_MAX]; error: size of array 'array_t' is too large Am I misunderstanding something in the standard here? Is size_t allowed to be too large for a given implementation? Or is this another bug in Mingw? EDIT: further research shows that typedef uint8_t array_t [SIZE_MAX/2]; // does compile typedef uint8_t array_t