Unless you're dealing with packed data (i.e., long arrays), there is no point in having scalars be less than 32 bits wide on modern architectures. This is due t

Unless you're dealing with packed data (i.e., long arrays), there is no point in having scalars be less than 32 bits wide on modern architectures. This is due to architectures being optimized for 32 or 64 bit wide registers and even wider data buses. Writing a single byte to memory is in fact more expensive than writing 64 bytes.