A little story

[Jerome BENOIT]

Thanks a lot for the explanation.
Jerome

On 25/06/12 02:54, bearophile wrote:
> Jerome BENOIT:
>
>> How come as ``integral numbers (will not be) overflow'' ?
>
> Multiprecision numbers allocate on the heap when they become large (or they always allocate on the heap). This has a significant performance impact. There are many situations where Multiprecision numbers are handy, but there are many other cases where you want to keep most of the performance (or memory use, or struct layouts, and type signatures, and more) of the normal machine fixnums. In this case compilation switches to enable/disable run-time overflow errors are useful.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile