Virtually all CPUs today implement two's complement signed integers natively. Even the few C-capable DSPs that I know about do too (and have separate types and

Virtually all CPUs today implement two's complement signed integers natively. Even the few C-capable DSPs that I know about do too (and have separate types and operations for saturation etc.). The main loss would be the compiler optimizations, and most of those can be recovered if programmers can avoid a few pitfalls, such as the ones I discussed. The problem with undefined behavior is not people ignoring portability. It's that it's actually really easy to accidentally misuse it. For example, Regehr's group has found quite a few such bugs in widely ported code written by smart people [0]. [0] http://embed.cs.utah.edu/ioc/ http://embed.cs.utah.edu/ioc/