Personally, I choose to just write non-standard C and turn on my compiler's option to define signed overflow as wrapping. Note that without that option, multip

Personally, I choose to just write non-standard C and turn on my compiler's option to define signed overflow as wrapping. Note that without that option, multiplication of unsigned shorts is undefined on platforms where sizeof(unsigned short) = sizeof(int)/2. That is due to the integer promotion rules. Let's say shorts are 16-bit and ints are 32-bit, which is the case on all consumer devices. Integer promotion rules lead to both unsigned short operands being first converted to ints before multiplication. If they are both equal to 0xffff, then the result is bigger than INT_MAX, and thus undefined. Which means that just multiplying two unsigned shorts is dangerous unless you cast them to unsigned ints first. Here is a godbolt link demonstrating the problem: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/3445PEGqY https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/3445PEGqY I have never seen the benefit of leaving signed overflow undefined, so I just make it defined to avoid weird problems like that. Most people think that all unsigned arithmetic is well defined, but unfortunately that's false.