I'm interested in the specs of the machine these benchmarks were run on. The CPU architecture can have a huge impact on this kind of thing.
**@erikenglund**: Perhaps you would be willing to do a full write-up for this proposal? Something as significant as changing the default `int` size of a language is not something to be taken likely. My recommendation is writing a benchmark comparing the performance and memory efficiency of 32 bit vs 64 bit integers in Nim. Then, run the benchmark on the following architectures: * AMD 32 bit * Intel 32 bit * AMD 64 bit * Intel 64 bit You will also want to ensure that each CPU has the exact same clock rate and number of cores. You may need to enlist some help unless you just have multiple machines lying around. I believe you will be surprised by the results. Modern CPUs are complex creatures. I'm no expert, but I do believe that different modern CPUs perform all sorts of cache optimizations and such that aren't exactly transparent even at the assembly level. My opinion on the subject is that my proposed experiment above is completely unnecessary. If you are writing something in Nim and find that 32 bit integers perform better for your use case, you should use 32 bit integers. In the vast majority of use cases, the performance difference is not a concern. In fact, in many use cases, the added precision is more important than the performance. On top of this, as explained multiple times earlier in the thread, integer performance in 32 bit vs 64 bit size is highly dependent on the CPU architecture. For instance, on a 32 bit CPU, 64 bit integers are very likely to have much worse performance than 32 bit integers. Vice versa may or may not be true(actually, if someone could explain how 32 bit integers work on a 64 bit chip, that would be awesome). This is why Nim chooses to use the CPU default int size for ints.
