On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:

> Kevin Reid wrote:
>
>> FWIW: Common Lisp has rigorously transparent (that is, you cannot observe
>> the machine word size) bigints and quite a few binary operations defined on
>> them, so it's where I personally would look for precedent on such questions.
>>
>
> (a) we don't have a bignum type yet; (b) we want to JIT to concrete
> machine types where possible. (b) does not require clz32 vs. clz64 in my
> view, because of type inference or AOT type-checking (asm.js). But we don't
> want to require bignums.
>

Yes, but choices which work for bignum also work for "I am working on
32-bit (or 8-bit or whatever) values which happen to be stored in a larger
(53- or 64-bit) field, and the length of the larger field is irrelevant to
the task".
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On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:

> (a) we don't have a bignum type yet; (b) we want to JIT to concrete
> machine types where possible. (b) does not require clz32 vs. clz64 in my
> view, because of type inference or AOT type-checking (asm.js). But we don't
> want to require bignums.
>

Yes, but choices which work for bignum also work for "I am working on
32-bit (or 8-bit or whatever) values which happen to be stored in a larger
(53- or 64-bit) field, and the length of the larger field is irrelevant to
the task".