Long shouldn't be avoided. The rule has always been 32-bits minimum. If that covers the range you need them you're good on every standards compliant platform, o

Long shouldn't be avoided. The rule has always been 32-bits minimum. If that covers the range you need them you're good on every standards compliant platform, otherwise you use a different type. That is how the C native integer types are supposed to be used to maintain forward portability across different word size architectures. What is wrong is to blindly assume your types are larger than the minimum or exactly equal to the minimum.