int opEquals(Object), and other legacy ints

[Bruno Medeiros]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Stewart Gordon wrote:
>>>> There seem to be a number of leftovers from before we had a bool 
>>>> type, and many people were using the int type to pass booleans around.
>>>
>>> They are typed as returning int for efficiency reasons. These 
>>> functions often appear in performance critical loops, where an extra 
>>> instruction or two makes a difference.
>>
>> But isn't bool an int internally? Why is it less efficient to use a bool?
> 
> It's a byte internally, and is constrained to be one of the values 0 or 1.

Duh, it's a byte of course, I should have checked that.

But the question remains, is it then less efficient to return a byte 
than a int? Why? And if so isn't there a way for the compiler to somehow 
optimize it?
I find it a bit hard to believe that nowadays there isn't sufficient 
compiler and/or CPU technology to somehow make a bool(byte) return value 
as efficient as a int one. :/

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D