On Tuesday, 11 December 2012 at 21:57:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/11/2012 10:45 AM, bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
Why stop at 64 bits? Why not make there only be one integral
type, and it
is of whatever precision is necessary to hold the value? This
is quite
doable, and has been done.
I think no one has asked for *bignums on default* in this
thread.
I know they didn't ask. But they did ask for 64 bits, and the
exact same
argument will apply to bignums, as I pointed out.
Agreed.
But at a terrible performance cost.
Nope, this is a significant fallacy of yours. Common lisp (and
OCaML) uses
tagged integers on default, and they are very far from being
"terrible".
Tagged integers cause no heap allocations if they aren't
large. Also the
Common Lisp compiler in various situations is able to infer an
integer can't
be too much large, replacing it with some fixnum. And it's
easy to add
annotations in critical spots to ask the Common Lisp compiler
to use a
fixnum, to squeeze out all the performance.
I don't notice anyone reaching for Lisp or Ocaml for high
performance applications.
I don't know about common LISP performances, never tried it in
something where that really matter. But OCaml is really very
performant. I don't know how it handle integer internally.
That's irrelevant to this discussion. It is not a problem with
the language.
Anyone can improve the library one if they desire, or do their
own.
The library is part of the language. What is a language with no
vocabulary ?
I think the compiler doesn't perform on BigInts the
optimizations it does on
ints, because it doesn't know about bigint properties.
I think the general lack of interest in bigints indicate that
the builtin types work well enough for most work.
That argument is fallacious. Something more used don't really
mean better. OR PHP and C++ are some of the best languages ever
made.
