A little story

[bearophile]

Jerome BENOIT:

> How come as ``integral numbers (will not be) overflow'' ?

Multiprecision numbers allocate on the heap when they become 
large (or they always allocate on the heap). This has a 
significant performance impact. There are many situations where 
Multiprecision numbers are handy, but there are many other cases 
where you want to keep most of the performance (or memory use, or 
struct layouts, and type signatures, and more) of the normal 
machine fixnums. In this case compilation switches to 
enable/disable run-time overflow errors are useful.

Bye,
bearophile