On Wednesday, 27 March 2013 at 00:32:12 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
Either way, it's the trade off that's been made, and it's not likely to change.
Sure, I was not arguing for changing that. I just wanted to clarify that when you say that "D explicitly ignores platforms with odd sizes" that does not mean that D cannot be implemented on these other machines, only that there might be a performance penalty (as had to be the case, given Turing et al...), depending on the exact circumstances.
What might actually be cooler would be being able to define your own types (though I don't expect that idea to be adopted soon, either), with their own properties, such as having ints that saturate instead of wrapping (like MMX), with different numbers of bits, etc. On a good compiler some of those alternative types would allow exploiting nice machine properties, and would complement the benefits of having the standard types, the same way pointers complement arrays. And you could actually define the C types on platforms where they don't match with the D types, as I pointed out earlier in this thread.
