Dynamic arrays allocation size

["Luís]

On Tuesday, 26 March 2013 at 18:24:39 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> http://dlang.org/expression.html#AddExpression
>
> "If both operands are of integral types and an overflow or 
> underflow occurs in the computation, wrapping will happen. That 
> is, uint.max + 1 == uint.min and uint.min - 1 == uint.max."

Thanks Steve!

Do you know if there ever was a (public?) discussion about this, 
before being defined this way? I wanted to see what trade-offs 
were considered, etc.

(For instance, one disadvantage I see with this definition is 
that it exacerbates the potential problems with D's well-defined 
integral types' sizes. Imagine I'm programming some 
microcontroller with unusual word or register sizes. For 
instance, 10 bits bytes instead of the usual 8 bit bytes. In C 
there would not be any performance penalty even for the unsigned 
char, which mandates wrapping, because the wrapping would occur 
at 2^10. In D you would have to put extra checks because a well 
defined size plus a well defined wrapping would not allow just 
using the native arithmetic instructions alone, which presumably 
would not guarantee wrapping at 8-bit widths.)