Interestingly, in our codebase at work we use completely opposite approach, but the code is C++, not C. We try everything to have its own type, so instead of "unsigned long", we would use "widget_counter_t", for example. I almost never encountered a situation, where I would need to know that widget_counter_t is actually unsigned long. And in rare case I need to know, I just hit F12 in Visual Studio and look at the type. But normally, variable type should semantically define what the variable holds, not describe the byte representation of that variable.
Is there a specific reason for using typedefs rather than (packed) structs? With typedefs you get no real type safety (you can pass a widget_counter_t to a method that expects a foo_t if both typedef to the same thing), do you?
