What I meant is that if you don't specifically need a small int size (because for instance you are going to serialize it into a format that mandates it), and yo

What I meant is that if you don't specifically need a small int size (because for instance you are going to serialize it into a format that mandates it), and you will not deal with even moderately large ints, you will probably use int even if you could use a smaller type. I've not seen many codebases doing something else. Of course you need to think about it. In C, but also in many languages (not python though, which magically switch to bigint when needed). In Java, the wrong int type won't cause UB, but it will throw (unchecked) exceptions.