Does the size of an int depend on the compiler and/or processor?

Question

Would the size of an integer depend upon the compiler, OS and processor?

Answer 1

Size of the int is equal to the word-length that depends upon the underlying ISA. Processor is just the hardware implementation of the ISA and the compiler is just the software-side implementation of the ISA. Everything revolves around the underlying ISA. Most popular ISA is Intel's IA-32 these days. it has a word length of 32bits or 4bytes. 4 bytes could be the max size of 'int' (just plain int, not short or long) compilers. based on IA-32, could use.

Answer 2

size of data type basically depends upon the type of compiler and compilers are designed on the basis of architecture of processors so externally data type can be considered to be compiler dependent.for ex size of integer is 2 byte in 16 bit tc compiler but 4 byte in gcc compiler although they are executed in same processor

Answer 3

The simple and correct answer is that it depends on the compiler. It doesn't mean architecture is irrelevant but the compiler deals with that, not your application. You could say more accurately it depends on the (target) architecture of the compiler for example if its 32 bits or 64 bits.

Consider you have windows application that creates a file where it writes an int plus other things and reads it back. What happens if you run this on both 32 bits and 64 bits windows? What happens if you copy the file created on 32 bits system and open it in 64 bits system?

You might think the size of int will be different in each file but no they will be the same and this is the crux of the question. You pick the settings in compiler to target for 32 bits or 64 bits architecture and that dictates everything.

Answer 4

Yes, it depends on both processors (more specifically, ISA, instruction set architecture, e.g., x86 and x86-64) and compilers including programming model. For example, in 16-bit machines, sizeof (int) was 2 bytes. 32-bit machines have 4 bytes for int. It has been considered int was the native size of a processor, i.e., the size of register. However, 32-bit computers were so popular, and huge number of software has been written for 32-bit programming model. So, it would be very confusing if 64-bit computer would have 8 bytes for int. Both Linux and Windows remain 4 bytes for int. But, they differ in the size of long.

Please take a look at the 64-bit programming model like LP64 for most *nix and LLP64 for Windows:

• http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#64-bit_data_models

Such differences are actually quite embarrassing when you write code that should work both on Window and Linux. So, I'm always using int32_t or int64_t, rather than long, via stdint.h.