Comment by thedufer

> But, oh!, the poor ints.

Empirically this is a rather low cost. IIRC, the extra ops add less than a cycle per arithmetic operation, due to amortizing them over multiple operations and clean pipelining (and also things like shifts just being really cheap).

But yes, there are certainly applications where we almost exclusively use Int64 or Int32 rather than the primary int type, if you need exactly that many bits.

> You know that at compile time, surely, when you set the build target, no?

Well, that's true of OCaml as well.

This is ultimately a difference of opinion - I think that the cost of installing a single extra library to get ints of various widths/signedness would be worth the advantage of eliminating nearly all memory errors (and various other advantages of a higher-level language).

The main carveout I would agree with is any case where you absolutely need strict memory bounds - it's not clear to me how you'd satisfy this with any GC'd language, since the GC behavior is ultimately somewhat chaotic.