"bearophile" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Integer numbers have some proprieties that compilers use with built-in > fixed-size numbers to optimize code. I think such optimizations are not > performed on library-defined numbers like a Fixed!128 or BigInt. This > means there are advantages of having cent/ucent/BigInt as built-ins. >
Yes, but the advantages in implementation ease and portability currently favour a library solution. Do the gcc or llvm backends support 128 bit integers? > Alternatively in theory special annotations are able to tell the compiler > that a user-defined type shares some of the characteristics of integer > numbers, allowing the compiler to optimize better at compile-time. But I > think not even the Scala compiler is so powerful. This would still require backend support for many things.
