Yes, however to get these, you are now in C99 land, which excludes you from some compilers (the obvious one is the MS compiler). What we do is define our own co

Yes, however to get these, you are now in C99 land, which excludes you from some compilers (the obvious one is the MS compiler). What we do is define our own compiler abstraction which can use stdint.h on C99 compilers, and typedef standard types into C99 versions for other compilers. So, once you have a working stdint-like thing you then usually want the "least" (or maybe "fast") variants of them instead: uint_least8_t, int_least16_t etc. These have the advantage of being actually guaranteed to exist (the exact size variants are only required to exist if the compiler exposes those types, and they are 8, 16, 32 or 64-bits (from memory)). This means that if you are running on a 24-bit chip (e.g. char==short==int==24-bit, long==48-bit) your code will still work good (where not working good could mean that it doesn't compile because it is missing types, or it could mean that it compiles, but is really slow as it is emulating un-naturally sized types) On the other hand, the type int_least8_t must exist. (as must 16, 32 and 64). However, to do the 64-bit type, you have to be careful, as C90 doesn't require a 64-bit type, so a fallback abstraction usually needs compiler specific tricks ("long long" is a safe bet). Of course, if you actually wanted a type that is exactly 16-bits wide, then use these types, as that is what they are for... but usually you don't care if it is bigger. And this is why the normal char/short/int/long types are good: They don't over-specify.