title: Difference between uint8_t and unspecified int for large matrices
body: <p>I have a matrix that is over 17,000 x 14,000 that I'm storing in memory in C++.  The values will never get over 255 so I'm thinking I should store this matrix as a uint8_t type instead of a regular int type.  Will the regular int type will assume the native word size (64 bit so 8 bytes per cell) even with an optimizing compiler?  I'm assuming I'll use 8x less memory if I store the array as uint8_t?</p>