> It's always been amazing to me how many different projects I've worked on (not that I've been in professional C for about 7 years now)) that include their own painstaking recreation of this file.
How many of them started before stdint.h existed? AFAIK, it's a somewhat recent addition to the C language, and IIRC, for a long time even after it became part of the C standard, some popular C compilers still didn't have it.
As recently as eight years ago, on projects started within the previous handful of years. It’s more to do with a lot of C programmers being stuck in a sort of stasis IMHO. (I’m sure I was too in many ways).
And yes, Microsoft were the outlier and absolutely dragged their heels on stdint, but you could always grab a compliant implementation from one of the FOSS projects that produced one.
There's no requirement for a born-1995 codebase to still build on a 1995 system in 2023.
I work on a born-1995 codebase. We started requiring an ISO C11 plus GNU extensions¹ several years ago and are actively removing "compatibility" checks and kludges that are outdated.
[¹ to be fair - not needing to support Windows is a godsend for any C project.]
How many of them started before stdint.h existed? AFAIK, it's a somewhat recent addition to the C language, and IIRC, for a long time even after it became part of the C standard, some popular C compilers still didn't have it.