> I agree that the OCaml runtime makes good compromises that 
> work well in practice.  Any added complexity would probably 
> hurt symbolic code, which seems to have had a high priority 
> in considerations of tradeoffs.

Just my two pence: in MLdonkey, int64 are used everywhere instead of
int, and instead of int32, which are two
small for file sizes. So, it will not benefit from any optimization on
int32. However, it would benefit 
from a new type 'long', that would be at-least a 63-bit integer.
Depending on the platform, this type could 
be implemented either by a traditionnal int (with the integer-bit set,
on 64-bit platforms), or by an int64 
on other platforms.

Since in the next years, more and more computers will be 64-bit, and
more and more applications will need 
support for integers in the range 33-bit ... 63-bit, this could be more
interesting than optimizing 32-bit 
integers (using the 'long' type, a program that would have used 32-bit
integers, would have the guaranty 
that the longs are not allocated on 64-bit platforms). Moreover, it can
probably be implemented in the 
Pervasives module without any changes in the compiler. But maybe int32
are already implemented by a normal int 
on 64-bit platforms ?


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