cent and ucent?

[Daniel Murphy]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:jg2cku$2ljk$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Integer numbers have some proprieties that compilers use with built-in 
> fixed-size numbers to optimize code. I think such optimizations are not 
> performed on library-defined numbers like a Fixed!128 or BigInt. This 
> means there are advantages of having cent/ucent/BigInt as built-ins.
>

Yes, but the advantages in implementation ease and portability currently 
favour a library solution.
Do the gcc or llvm backends support 128 bit integers?

> Alternatively in theory special annotations are able to tell the compiler 
> that a user-defined type shares some of the characteristics of integer 
> numbers, allowing the compiler to optimize better at compile-time. But I 
> think not even the Scala compiler is so powerful.

This would still require backend support for many things.