Time to move std.experimental.checkedint to std.checkedint ?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 07:13:07 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> All I can say is code gen is never that simple. There are just 
> too many rules that conflict. The combinatorial explosion means 
> some heuristics are relied on that produce better results most 
> of the time. I suppose a good AI research project would be to 
> train an AI to produce better overall patterns.
>
> But, in general,
>
> 1. LEA is faster for more than one operation
> 2. using fewer registers is better
> 3. getting locals into registers is better
> 4. generating fewer instructions is better
> 5. generating shorter instructions is better
> 6. jumpless code is better

Thanks for the insight!

My personal perspective is that:

- Silicon will keep getting faster and cheaper with time

- A 7% or a 14% or even a +100% slowdown is relatively 
insignificant considering the overall march of progress - Moore's 
law, but also other factors such as the average size and 
complexity of programs, which will also keep increasing as people 
expect software to do more things, which will drown out such 
"one-time" slowdowns as integer overflow checks

- In the long term, people will invariably prefer programming 
languages which produce correct results (with less code), over 
programming languages whose benefit is only that they're faster.

So, it seems to me that Rust made the choice to only enable 
overflow checks in debug mode in order to be competitive with the 
programming languages of its time. I think Zig's design is the 
more future-proof - there will continue to be circumstances in 
which speed is preferable over correctness, such as video games 
(where an occasional wrong result is tolerable), so having 
distinct ReleaseFast and ReleaseSafe modes makes sense.

BTW, another data point along Rust and Zig is of course Python 3, 
in which all integers are BigInts (but with small numbers inlined 
in the value, akin to small string optimizations).