On: C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

[mmoll]

I came here to say exactly that. There’s int_leastN_t for storage and int_fastN_t for computation. Stdint.h really gets a bad rap here.

[lexicality → mmoll]

fwiw depending on use cases you might actually want to be using the fast variants for storage too, for example on arm64 you'll get aligned memory loads