Comment by magnio
8 months ago
Congrats on the launch.
I know the docs say this will be fixed soon, but what is the main reason for restricting number types to 24 bits? I saw in the code that they are wrapper around the 32-bit system number types, so what prevents Bend from changing them to U32(u32) right now?
Great question!
Short answer: GPU
Long answer: CUDA
Seriously though. Implementing a full high-level lang in parallel is HARD, so, to simplify it greatly, we made IC nodes 64-bit, which allows us to use native 64-bit atomic operations in many parts of the implementation. Since each 64-bit node has 2 ports, that gives us 32 bits per port. And since we use 3 bits for the tag, that leaves us with 29 bit payloads. We used that space to easily implement unboxed numbers (f24, u24, i24).
That said, we will have (boxed) 64-bit numbers soon! With this foundation in place, adding them is a matter of coding. I just want to have some time to let people use the limited version, find bugs, etc., before I add more stuff.