> Afraid I’m not convinced that adding a bunch of aliases into the standard for other types in the standard, and those aliases provide no additional semantic meaning, is warranted.
I understand your concern. However, I think there's value in consistency with the rest of the STL (e.g. u16string), as well as improved readability and brevity, especially in codebases where they are heavily used. It would also help in reducing the duplication across codebases since many already define those locally. 

Hmm, the code search you provided also showed instances where the type wasn’t directly translated, like going from u8 to boost::uint_fast8_t.

Afraid I’m not convinced that adding a bunch of aliases into the standard for other types in the standard, and those aliases provide no additional semantic meaning, is warranted.

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 9:24 AM Radu Ungureanu via Std-Proposals <std-proposals@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

Aliasing stdint types like uint16_t to shorter names like u16 has become
a very common practice. This trend has influenced other modern languages
like Rust, Zig, Cpp2, Carbon and Odin to adopt this. On GitHub, u8 alone
has lead to the same ~6k lines of code (counted with
https://github.com/search?q=%22typedef+uint8_t+u8%22+language%3AC%2B%2B++NOT+is%3Afork&type=code
and
https://github.com/search?q=%22using+u8+%3D%22+language%3AC%2B%2B++NOT+is%3Afork&type=code).
These names (int*_t) while precise, are quite verbose and cumbersome to
use, especially in codebases where dealing with low-level code is the
norm such as binary loaders or networking tools.

I propose the following to be included in <cstdint>, a approach which
has been inspired by std::literals:

     namespace std {
     namespace ints {
     using i8  = int8_t;
     using u8  = uint8_t;
     using i16 = int16_t;
     using u16 = uint16_t;
     using i32 = int32_t;
     using u32 = uint32_t;
     using i64 = int64_t;
     using u64 = uint64_t;
     using iN  = intN_t;
     using uN  = uintN_t;
     }
     }

The typical usage of this would be as follows:

     using namespace std::ints;
     struct SomeFileFormatHeader {
         u16 magic;
         u32 checksum;
         u32 num_entries;
         // etc...
     }

I have considered putting those in the same namespace as int*_t but that
would break existing code that already defines those types using the
help of stdint.

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