Question

I am looking to typedef my own arithmetic types (e.g. Byte8, Int16, Int32, Float754, etc) with the intention of ensuring they comprise a specific number of bits (and in the case of the float, adhere to the IEEE754 format). How can I do this in a completely cross-platform way?

I have seen snippets of the C/C++ standards here and there and there is a lot of:

“type is at least x bytes”

and not very much of:

“type is exactly x bytes”.

Given that typedef Int16 unsigned short int may not necessarily result in a 16-bit Int16, is there a cross-platform way to guarantee my types will have specific sizes?

Answer 1

You can use exact-width integer types int8_t, int16_t, int32_t, int64_t declared in <cstdint>. This way the sizes are fixed on all the platforms