Why would uint32_t be preferred rather than uint_fast32_t?

Question

It seems that uint32_t is much more prevalent than uint_fast32_t (I realise this is anecdotal evidence). That seems counter-intuitive to me, though.

Answer 1

For practical purposes, uint_fast32_t is completely useless. It's defined incorrectly on the most widespread platform (x86_64), and doesn't really offer any advantages anywhere unless you have a very low-quality compiler. Conceptually, it never makes sense to use the "fast" types in data structures/arrays - any savings you get from the type being more efficient to operate on will be dwarfed by the cost (cache misses, etc.) of increasing the size of your working data set. And for individual local variables (loop counters, temps, etc.) a non-toy compiler can usually just work with a larger type in the generated code if that's more efficient, and only truncate to the nominal size when necessary for correctness (and with signed types, it's never necessary).

The one variant that is theoretically useful is uint_least32_t, for when you need to be able to store any 32-bit value, but want to be portable to machines that lack an exact-size 32-bit type. Practically, speaking, however, that's not something you need to worry about.