Question

Firstly yes i know that ints are more native than bytes and that all math and logical operations on bytes are actually done on ints. This of course means that there is a cost of widening and narrowing if using bytes. However on the counterbalance this also means that memory bytes really hold bytes and not potentially some greater than byte value value, eg 256.

Im guessing in both cases there are pros and cons but in would i am after opinions.

Answer 1

i would use whatever type made is easiest to emulate the the hardware in question.

if it was an 8-bit computer that would probably be bytes. for something like an x86-64 i imagine a long (64 bits) would make more sense. in both cases the chose size is more likely to match register operations and the size of data “words” transferred between cpu and memory:

All general-purpose registers (GPRs) are expanded from 32 bits to 64
bits, and all arithmetic and logical operations, memory-to-register
and register-to-memory operations, etc., can now operate directly on
64-bit integers. Pushes and pops on the stack are always in 8-byte
strides, and pointers are 8 bytes wide.

from wikipedia