Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 09:25:23 +0200 From: gbm AT ii DOT pw DOT edu DOT pl (Grzegorz B. Mazur) To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu Subject: 16 vs. 32 On REAL 32 bit chips, like 386, 486 and above, and MC68020 and above 32-bit maath is at least as fast as 16-bit, assuming that the operands are in registers or are properly aligned in memory (and memorybus is at least 32-bit wide). The above is not the case for MC68000, 68010 (16-bit memory bus and 16 bit INTERNAL BUS!!!), and for 386SX memory references. So there is no reason for not using 32 bit ints for 386+. All the real compilers do it (incl. GCC). G.