Why / when to use `intptr_t` for type-casting in C?

Question

I have a question regarding using intptr_t vs. long int. I've observed that incrementing memory addresses (e.g. via manual pointer arithmetic) differs by data type. For instance incrementing a char pointer adds 1 to the memory address, whereas incrementing an int pointer adds 4, 8 for a double, 16 for a long double, etc...

At first I did something like this:

char myChar, *pChar;
float myFloat, *pFloat;

pChar = &myChar;
pFloat = &myFloat;

printf( "pChar:  %d\n", ( int )pChar );
printf( "pFloat: %d\n", ( int )pFloat );

pChar++;
pFloat++;

printf( "and then after incrementing,:\n\n" );
printf( "pChar:  %d\n", (int)pChar );
printf( "pFloat:    %d\n", (int)pFloat );

which compiled and executed just fine, but XCode gave me warnings for my typecasting: "Cast from pointer to integer of different size."

After some googling and binging (is the latter a word yet?), I saw some people recommend using intptr_t:

#include <stdint.h>

...

printf( "pChar:  %ld\n", ( intptr_t )pChar );
printf( "pFloat: %ld\n", ( intptr_t )pFloat );

which indeed resolves the errors. So, I thought, from now on, I should use intptr_t for typecasting pointers... But then after some fidgeting, I found that I could solve the problem by just replacing int with long int:

printf( "pChar:  %ld\n", ( long int )pChar );
printf( "pFloat: %ld\n", ( long int )pFloat );

So my question is, why is intptr_t useful, and when should it used? It seems superfluous in this instance. Clearly, the memory addresses for myChar and myFloat were just too big to fit in an int... so typecasting them to long ints solved the problem.

Is it that sometimes memory addresses are too big for long int as well? Now that I think about it, I guess that's possible if you have > 4GB of RAM, in which case memory addresses could exceed 2^32 - 1 (max value for unsigned long ints...) but C was created long before that was imaginable, right? Or were they that prescient?

Thanks!

Answer 1

intptr_t is a new invention, created after 64-bit and even 128-bit memory addresses were imagined.

If you ever need to cast a pointer into an integer type, always use intptr_t. Doing anything else will cause unnecessary problems for people who need to port your code in the future.

It took a long time to iron out all of the bugs with this in programs like Mozilla/Firefox when people wanted to compile it on 64-bit Linux.