(jumping up the thread to try and hop over some confusion...) The problem isn't with unsigned types generally. Its with subregister unsigned types. So, size_

(jumping up the thread to try and hop over some confusion...) The problem isn't with unsigned types generally. Its with subregister unsigned types. So, size_t and uintptr_t are fine. uint32_t, uint16_t, uint8_t (on LP64 ABIs) are pessimized and demand zero-extension instructions (or proofs that they can be safely elided) prior to causing side-effects. uint64_t on a LP128 ABI would also be problematic. signed 32-bit int is also fine... because RISC-V specifically has a suite of arithmetic instructions that unconditionally sign-extend from bit 31. Even without those, it would still be fine because the carve-out for undefined behavior is wide enough for INT_MAX+1 to remain positive. Same thing for all of the other narrow-width signed integer types. If you increment SHRT_MAX and then use it to index memory, its perfectly legal undefined behavior to access base + SHRT_MAX+1 instead of base + SHRT_MIN. However, that's not legal for the unsigned types. They are all mandated to wrap in 2's complement. base + UINT_MAX+1 must access base + 0 when the index is `unsigned int`, even on a 64-bit machine.