alt Hacker NewsWhy would it be a mistake? It's efficient for the target platform.
The same code can be compiled for different platforms, yes, but the assembly and machine code will vary significantly, so it could behave differently. Porting to a new platform was usually a very complex process, but the code produced was efficient. Nobody seems to care about this nowadays, though, it seems.
Except the way it's done in C is illogical to the point where it negates the value proposition.
People expect numbers to support specific ranges and it is fine to define the data types numerically rather than as a concrete bit pattern, but C just takes the cake.
Char is at least 8 bits, short is at least 16 bits, int is at least as big as short (genius idea), long is at least 32 bits, long long is at least 64 bits.
The point of "int" is to be the integer equivalent of size_t and therefore be of word size.
But nobody uses int like that. Everyone assumes it's a 32 bit datatype when it isn't.
The use case where you port existing C code to a microcontroller is extremely unappealing, because the number range gets changed under your feet. When I've had to work on embedded software everyone just used int8_t, int16_t, int32_t, int64_t for portability instead.