More numeric types about hvm HOT 8 CLOSED

F60 and U60 are now merged on Master. I don't think we should have other integer types.

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@VictorTaelin Can you comment on / give links to some papers on how to lower signed integers (in higher-level languages) to unsigned integers (in HVM as a backend)? It's not immediately obvious to me.

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Hmm perhaps adding I60 isn't a bad idea to be fair. Should be very simple to do now (see F60.hvm and U60.hvm).

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Do we have f32 and i32 already?

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No, I think f32/i32/u32 should just be implemented as a lib, but not too sure about that. Any reason you think these should be native? I believe a minimalist design is important, must have caution not to become a bloated spec

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If f32/i32/u32 can be implemented as a lib without performance issues I'm totally fine with it. I was just thinking about use-cases for games where f32's are used heavily. I'd assume we'd want to be able to take advantage of hardware float operations, which I wasn't sure if we could do in a lib or not.

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In that case you should just use a F60. Since the pointer size is 64, a F32 would just have 28 empty bits. What we could (should?) do in a future perhaps is have a 32-bit version of HVM?

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That's an interesting question. I'm not sure if using 64 bit floats everywhere would have negative impact on performance or not.

Maybe a 32-bit HVM does make sense. I don't know. 🤷‍♂️

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