How to Declare a 32-bit Integer in C
C doesn't concern itself very much with exact sizes of integer types, C99 introduces the header stdint.h , which is probably your best bet. Include that and you can use e.g. int32_t
. Of course not all platforms might support that.
Corey's answer is correct for "best", in my opinion, but a simple "int" will also work in practice (given that you're ignoring systems with 16-bit int). At this point, so much code depends on int being 32-bit that system vendors aren't going to change it.
(See also why long is 32-bit on lots of 64-bit systems and why we have "long long".)
One of the benefits of using int32_t, though, is that you're not perpetuating this problem!