Primitives

Xi abandons platform-dependent standard C types like int or long in favor of mathematically guaranteed bit-widths.

Why it Shines on ESP32/Arduino

When you write unsigned long on an Arduino Nano (AVR 8-bit), it compiles to 32 bits. When you write unsigned long on a Raspberry Pi 4 (AArch64), it compiles to 64 bits.

If you are serializing network packets from a sensor to a server using the xic library, using standard C types will result in corrupt networking headers when crossing architectures. Xi::Primitives fixes this.

The Types

Include Xi/Primitives.hpp to access these global aliases.

Fixed-Width Integers

These guarantee the exact same physical byte footprint on an ESP32 as they do on an x86 server:

• u8 -> Unsigned 8-bit Integer (uint8_t)

• u16 -> Unsigned 16-bit Integer (uint16_t)

• u32 -> Unsigned 32-bit Integer (uint32_t)

• u64 -> Unsigned 64-bit Integer (uint64_t)

• i8, i16, i32, i64 -> Signed variations

The Platform Size usz

• usz -> The equivalent of size_t or uintptr_t.

usz defines the native pointer width of the architecture. On an ESP32, usz is exactly 32 bits (4 bytes). On an AWS EC2 instance, usz is exactly 64 bits (8 bytes). It is critical to use usz for memory offsets, bounds checking, and pointer arithmetic to prevent overflow. Xi explicitly checks sizing bounds to silence -Wshift-count-overflow warnings when manipulating hashes differently.