Monthly Archives: January 2024

Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

The Challenge of Fixed-Size Integers Before C99

In embedded programming, before adopting the C99 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999), a significant challenge was ensuring the consistent sizing of key data objects. This complexity stemmed from the C standard’s (ISO/IEC 9899) non-committal stance on the size of an int. We knew:

A short is a minimum of 16-bits.
A long is a minimum of 32-bits.
An int is somewhere between a short and a long.

This flexibility boosted C’s portability, making it a favourite for various architectures, including […]

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