Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1641

Chris Adams

Great! Give me an account so I can do some testing. Maybe I'll even add tuned asm for that system. Does the Alpha's cycle counter still wrap around at 32 bits?

No. Programmers for four decades have been crashing into the largest 32-bit counter value. Nobody has been crashing into the largest 64-bit counter value. It takes a really long time to count up to 2^64. Yes, some of us perform computations using larger numbers, but we aren't happy with a 128-bit limit either.

What's reasonable to expect is that speed will become less and less of an issue for most (though not all) programmers, whereas convenience will remain extremely important. Error-prone data types such as ``integers modulo 2^32'' will become increasingly unpopular. Practically all code will switch to variable-length integers. Meanwhile, chip design will be driven by the increasingly small fractions of code that actually matter for computer performance. Chip designers will choose integer register sizes to achieve the best price-performance ratio for that code, taking account of the fact that integers are usually very small.

---D. J. Bernstein, buttociate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago