On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 12:48 AM, Patrick Walton <pcwal...@mozilla.com> wrote: > On 1/10/14 9:41 PM, Corey Richardson wrote: >> >> The current consensus on this subject, afaik, is the rename int/uint >> to intptr/uintptr. They're awful names, but it frees up int for a >> *fast* bigint type. Fast here is key. We can't have a suboptimal >> numeric type be the recommended default. We need to perform at least >> as well as GMP for me to even consider it. Additionally we'd have >> generic numeric literals. I don't think anyone wants what we current >> have for *numerics*. Fixed-size integers are necessary for some tasks, >> but numerics is not one of them. > > I wasn't aware of this consensus. I'm not sure what I think; int and uint as > they are is pretty nice for array indexing. > > Patrick
I think it's very important to remove the default fallback to `int` so Rust can leave this as an explicit choice for the programmer. It's too easy to accidentally fall back to a fixed-size signed integer and since the length varies based on the pointer-size, you may not run into the bugs on the platform you're developing on. It would be nice to name them based on what they are instead of making them out as good defaults, because this should really be an explicit choice. High-level logic will often (but not always) want a big integer type, and it's too easy to just use `int` because it's the "default". _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list Rust-dev@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
