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Is that really that much of a big deal, though? Before stdint, if one needed that level of accuracy, one would do your own equivalent of stdinit by hand, and adjust those definitions when porting to another compiler/platform. The same goes for your local boolean type.

I think the only real annoyance is that each programmer/team did it with their own convention (I32, INT32, i32, int32, WORD, Word bool, BOOL, Bool, etc., etc.); standardizing helps with putting everyone on the same page more than it helps porting. It doesn't prevent people from reverse-typedef-ing standard names to local "dialectal" names, though.

But I also think that one should only rarely use raw integer types, in an ideal world; the elephant in the room is that typedef is kind of the second "billion dollars mistake" [1]. C is a weakly typed language and there's no practical way to undo it (besides transpilation), so there's double no point to leave behind raw types.

[1] For those not too familiar with C, typedef defines a "type alias", not a type: https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/typedef

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The deal was dealing with #ifdef spaghetti to define all of those, especially when mixing libraries across platforms.
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Ifdef soup is still horrible, so those times (which I didn't experience firsthand) must have been abysmal.
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If you want to know how bad it can be, only need to take a look at GCC's implementation of `stddef.h` for `size_t` and `ptrdiff_t` etc.

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/ginclude/s...

There's a simpler way to define these types in newer versions of C which have `typeof`, we can take advantage of the fact that `sizeof()` always returns a `size_t`, `ptr - ptr` always returns a `ptrdiff_t`, and a literal L'c' has type `wchar_t`, etc.

    typedef typeof(sizeof(0)) size_t;
    typedef typeof(nullptr) nullptr_t;
    typedef typeof((void*)0-(void*)0) ptrdiff_t;
    typedef typeof(L'\0') wchar_t;
    typedef typeof(u8'\0') char8_t;
    typedef typeof(u'\0') char16_t;
    typedef typeof(U'\0') char32_t;
Don't need ifdef soup to test what the sizes of things are on different architectures - we just utilize the compiler's implementation of those types.
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C99 kinda fixed that with the `(u)int_leastN_t` types (which are hardly used in practice though). And shame that it took Microsoft 16 years to even start supporting C99 though so we were basically forced to keep using our own custom integer typedefs long after the C standard had fixed the issue.
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Agreed, but it could have been there since day one, given the languages in 1960's.

Well, Microsoft has considered C done for quite some time, and after C++20, they don't seem to be in a hurry to keep up with ISO either for C or C++ (there are discussions on support channels about customer relevant C++23 and C++26 features, none on C past C17), similar to how Apple and Google are handling their in box compilers as well.

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I thought most implementations of C have stdint (intN_t, leastN_t and fastN_t etc).
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These are C99 features which MSVC only got around 2015 (of course a decade later those are safe to use in portable code).
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