stdint.h is a disappointing absence from both Visual Studio 2008 and the TR1 feature pack. This header was introduced in the C99 standard library to allow programmers to write more portable code by providing a set of typedefs that specify exact-width integer types, together with the defined minimum and maximum allowable values for each type. This standardized the approach for writing such things as uint32_t and should save countless hours of needless duplication for projects that like to define their own variants such as uint32, UINT32, u32, Xyz32U, etc.

Since the C++ standard was finalized in 1998, it missed this standard header by a year. In the latest update to the C++ standard (namely those extensions covered in TR1), support for this header has been added in the form of the cstdint header.

It is astonishing to find that a header that was standardized 9 years ago has still not made its way into Visual Studio 2008. Not even the recent feature pack beta which included support for most of the TR1 extensions, contained stdint.h! The lack of support for this header was logged as a bug with Microsoft way back in 2005 but is still in the “postponed” bucket.

Thankfully, there are a number of implementations of stdint.h available, the most notable being Paul Hsieh’s cross-platform free implementation and also a Microsoft compiler specific implementation. Simply place one of these implementations into the Visual Studio standard include paths and stdint.h support magically appears … now why can’t Microsoft do something like that!