Handling non-standard integer types

[Jonathan Worthington]

On 2/12/2012 5:53 PM, Jonathan "Duke" Leto wrote:
> 3) sounds the most reasonable to get something done in the near future.
> whiteknight++ is right in that a PMC will be slower, but let's cross
> that optimization bridge when we get there.
It's not just optimization, it's also about code generation, box/unbox 
handling, natively typed attributes and lexicals, and probably much 
more. The future technical debt we get with this option ain't worth it - 
neither for Rakudo nor for Parrot.

> These kind of needs are the kind of thing that will influence the design
> of M0 (no, I haven't given up on that), so I would also like to hear a
> detailed explanation from Rakudo folk about *exactly* what they want and
> need.
Well, in this case I'd say M0 needs to mostly decouple various things 
that Parrot couples (like register size and opcode size), and actually 
have some notion of native type system, so it is aware of different 
integer sizes and signednesses. That probably means leaving the notion 
of "4 register types to rule them all" behind, if that didn't already 
happen.

/jnthn