Why oh why do people want a value to have different bounds depending on which system it is used? This is a source of huge confusion and why people stick to uint8 and other precise types
My main issues with it are:
1. Like many other performance optimizations, it is a trade-off. You may be sacrificing easy maintenance or even introducing breakage (if the person using it doesn't understand the limitations and implications). So IMHO you should only do it if you can show through profiling, etc. that the gain is real and worth it.
2. As a matter of language ergonomics, it should never be something that anyone does unknowingly. You should have to explicitly ask for it. The type name should be something blindingly obviously like "native_int" or "word_int".
On CPUs with 64-bit and 32-bit registers, that typically is the register-sized integer type. Machines with 16-bit registers are a bit of an edge case, as 16-bit integers may both be a lot faster on them then 32-bit integers and, in many cases, too small)
If go chose to use 32-bit integers as default, some users on 64-bit systems would complain that they couldn’t create, say, an array of 6 billion ints. If they chose 64-bit, some users on 32-bit systems would complain their loops were needlessly slow, and code bloated (why waste 4 bytes of almost every integer in a program?)
Not having generics makes this more of a problem. If go had generics, switching between integer sizes could be a matter of recompilation using a different compiler flag)
A sufficiently advanced compiler would help here, but go doesn’t have one (not exceptional), and doesn’t even aim to have one (compilation speed seems more of a goal than run-time speed)
Isn't it already the case that you can switch between int sizes with compiler flags?
var i int
Is there any language where generics are useful for switching between int sizes? None come to mind offhand, so I don't quite understand what you mean.
For comparison, Java's int type is 32 bits on 64 bit systems, but then this limits the array size. It seems like a lesser evil to have a platform-native int type than to limit the size of arrays (especially since servers can be expected to increase their max memory going forward).
Of course, standardizing on 64 bit ints instead would require emulating them on 32 bit systems, when they can't support that much memory anyway (you could argue that 32 bit systems don't matter much anymore, but if you really don't care about ever running on them, then you can just treat 'int' as 64 bits and not variable size).
If you really need to, it's easy to wrap this into your own BigArray-class holding a 32bit-array-of-32bit-arrays and overriding the []-operator with Int64 as argument.
Take for example code which finds consecutive differences in a list, something like
for i := 0; i < len(list) - 1; i++ {
print(list[i+1] - list[i])
}
So this is the rationale for using signed integers rather than unsigned integers. I think the language semantics should go further, and use true integers pretty much everywhere. Note that the compiler could still easily see that the index variable in the loop above is bounded, and use a machine word under-the-hood. But the programmer only ever has to think about well-behaved integers.
uintptr an unsigned integer large enough to store the uninterpreted bits of a pointer value
The original thread was about converting int to be an arbitrary precision type: "so that 'int' can become a true integer". One would imagine that, to preserve the ability to do pointer <-> non-pointer number, they would just leave uintptr alone, and so basically ignore your concerns, whereas int as the "native type" for slice indexes and the like is a more likely reason to prevent messing with "int" itself