it's a great read!

would like to learn some tricks, like configuring gcc so that int is 64 bits, and so on

At the time its was probably very hard to know what the fixed sizes should be.

Thank you for the article! Do I see a Turbo-C screenshot there or am I imagining it? It was my first IDE (I didn't know that's what it was called) when I started programming. I sometimes miss it, it was really good, especially the help system.

I agree with the article of course. I think most confusion comes not having learned about the purpose of having them be defined based on the architecture in the first place. It took me a long time before I stumbled upon how they really worked and why, because while I started it was either x86 or nothing. When x64 showed up, suddenly it became relevant and everybody started learning about C types more in depth as they ran into issues with sizeof.

Also, misuse in data protocols is where I think the bad reputation of the flexible type sizes came from. stdint was desperately needed for that reason and it came a bit late.

Good article.

C would probably not have survived unless it had this flexibility.

But its not justa historical thing. Today there are modern platforms like DSPs that have 32bit sized char, because that is the smallest addressable type. These platforms depend on C for tool chains, even if most "portable" C wont run correctly on them. The fact that you can build hardware like that, and not have to invent a new language / dialect to program them is a huge win for the world.