Re: Using the GNU GMP Library for Bignums in Emacs

[dancol]

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>
>   > Of course we could to do that. Hopefully there isn't existing
>   > Emacs Lisp code that relies on unsafe arithmetic /anywhere/. If the
>   > functions + - * / operate on bignums (instead of dedicated bignum
>   > functions), would that mean we drop 32/64 bit integers entirely?
>
> To eliminate the current types for small integers would
> require rewriting of much of the C code in Emacs.
> It would be better to represent small integers as now,
> and have a different structure for larger integers.
>

I'd love to see Emacs get transparent bigint support. Python semantics are
fine, as is using a normal int representation at the C level. Adding
transparent bigints as Lisp types doesn't require us to increase various
Emacs core limits right away.