Dynamic arrays allocation size

["Luís]

On Wednesday, 27 March 2013 at 00:32:12 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> Either way, it's the trade off that's been made, and it's not 
> likely to change.

Sure, I was not arguing for changing that. I just wanted to 
clarify that when you say that "D explicitly ignores platforms 
with odd sizes" that does not mean that D cannot be implemented 
on these other machines, only that there might be a performance 
penalty (as had to be the case, given Turing et al...), depending 
on the exact circumstances.

What might actually be cooler would be being able to define your 
own types (though I don't expect that idea to be adopted soon, 
either), with their own properties, such as having ints that 
saturate instead of wrapping (like MMX), with different numbers 
of bits, etc. On a good compiler some of those alternative types 
would allow exploiting nice machine properties, and would 
complement the benefits of having the standard types, the same 
way pointers complement arrays. And you could actually define the 
C types on platforms where they don't match with the D types, as 
I pointed out earlier in this thread.