[nicoburns]

That explains "int", but it doesn't explain short or long or long long. Rust has "usize" for the "int" case, and then fixed sizes for everything else, which works much better. If you want portable software, it's usually more important to know how many bits you have available for your calculation than it is to know how efficiently that calculation will happen.

[creativemonkeys]

I suppose short and long have to do with register sizes being available as half word and dword, and there are instructions that work with smaller data sizes on both x86 and ARM, but I agree that in today's world, you want to know the number of bits. On those weak 4MHz machines, squeezing a few extra cycles was typically very important.