Motivation for using size_t uint32 uint64 etc

Question

When I reading some code, for integer, they use bunch of different type such as size_t, uint32, uint64 etc. What is the motivation or purpose to do this? Why not ju

Answer 1

The motivation to use them is because you can't rely on int, short or long to have any particular size - a mistake made by too many programmers far too many times in the past. If you look not too far back in history, there was a transition from 16 bit to 32 bit processors, which broke lots of code because people had wrongly relied on int being 16 bits. The same mistake was made thereafter when people relied on int to be 32 bits, and still do so even to this day.

Not to mention the terms int, short and long have been truly nuked by language designers who all decide to make them mean something different. A Java programmer reading some C will naively expect long to mean 64 bits. These terms are truly meaningless - they don't specify anything about a type, and I facepalm every time I see a new language released that still uses the terms.

The standard int types were a necessity so you can use the type you want to use. They should've deprecated int, short and long decades ago.