[dianeb]

In C, you get what you pay for. When the platform changes, it's not unreasonable to recompile in order to take advantage of new hardware features. The OS is certainly different, even if it's still called "Whatever OS", it had to be recompiled in order to support the new hardware, unless, of course, it doesn't. We're all lazy when it comes to our own work, whether it's supporting new hardware in a compiler or OS or super web service on some new cloud platform or a large system vendor.

intmax_t by intent is the maximum integer available on a given platform. Abandoning that idea is a disservice to compiler writers, programmers -- especially scientific programmers -- everywhere.

[teddyh]

Oh, I agree completely. Distributions should have bit the bullet and announced a new architecture when the new CPUs with new integer types were released.