I was about to jump in and say "no it's not!" but I see several people have pointed out that the C Standard of all things says bytes don't necessarily have 8 bi

I was about to jump in and say "no it's not!" but I see several people have pointed out that the C Standard of all things says bytes don't necessarily have 8 bits. Wow! What I'd like to know is, how common are non-8-bit-byte CPUs these days, for new devices? I worked with Texas Instruments C54x and C55x DSPs back in the early 2000s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320#C5000_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320#C5000...). They had 16-bit chars and that was incredibly annoying -- very few low-level third-party libraries would even compile properly. Are those still used? It seems like everything has an ARM chip on the side these days, so maybe (hopefully) there's less need to run application code on bizarre DSPs. Except for those unsung heroes maintaining old set-top boxes and the like.