Int is not cross-platform and forward-compatible. It's implementation-defined, so it's up to the compiler. Practically speaking, every modern compiler defines i

Int is not cross-platform and forward-compatible. It's implementation-defined, so it's up to the compiler. Practically speaking, every modern compiler defines int as 4 bytes, and can be expected to never change that (because of the vast swaths of bad code out there that is written with the assumption that an int is 4 bytes). So it's not forward-compatible. And while on most platforms you can expect the compiler to have picked 4 bytes, it's certainly possible for compilers to pick other sizes for int (I would assume compilers for embedded architectures might do that), which means it's not cross-platform either.