[Pre-Pitch] Arithmetic operators that emit NIL on overflow

[dwaite (David Waite)]

@wadetregaskis

Do you think end users care about that semantic distinction?

Apologies if I did not pick up any original sarcasm.

I was confirming that yes, the hardware implementation of the math operations is to proceed with the safety net being an interrupt on issues. This hardware implementation has improved performance and memory usage.

We already have operators which can be used in cases where a developer must use 'safe' operations due to potential overflows. These have an impact - my point was that all of the approaches (throwing, optional, boolean indicating overflow) when done in library space have similar performance impacts.

The end user does not care why the developer's application crashed, no. They do care that the issue is fixed, and a crash report which indicates exactly where the math failed will help the developer accomplish that. This is a consistent decision in Swift design.

[dwaite (David Waite)]

@CTMacUser

Unless, arguably, you want to run tests. The pain point inspiring my pitch above was that I wanted my sequences to detect when they're about to overflow and just simply end, instead of crashing (which loses your last test and anything that would have gone after).

Yes, I've had to deal with this (not yet for math overflows, but for various other protocols which deal with errors by terminating). I'm not especially happy that I need to pull in third party solutions in order to deal with that.