c - Determine word size of my processor

Question

How do I determine the word size of my CPU? If I understand correct an int should be one word right? I'm not sure if I am correct.

So should just printing sizeof(int) would be enough to determine the word size of my processor?

Answer 1

Your assumption about sizeof(int) is untrue; see this.

Since you must know the processor, OS and compiler at compilation time, the word size can be inferred using predefined architecture/OS/compiler macros provided by the compiler.

However while on simpler and most RISC processors, word size, bus width, register size and memory organisation are often consistently one value, this may not be true to more complex CISC and DSP architectures with various sizes for floating point registers, accumulators, bus width, cache width, general purpose registers etc.

Of course it begs the question why you might need to know this? Generally you would use the type appropriate to the application, and trust the compiler to provide any optimisation. If optimisation is what you think you need this information for, then you would probably be better off using the C99 'fast' types. If you need to optimise a specific algorithm, implement it for a number of types and profile it.