Ruling out arbitrary cost copy construction?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

> I think it's also important to make BigInt.sizeof == ulong.sizeof. To that end, 
> you can use the least significant bit to mean "this is not a pointer", as in a 
> 63 bit integer << 1.

Lot of time ago I have instead suggest BigInt.sizeof == size_t.sizeof, because in most programs you need integers smaller than 63 bit, 31 bits are enough. This increases the performance a little on 32 bit systems.

Bye,
bearophile