From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2002-09-06T01:19:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Best GC for Ruby?

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 01:08:04AM +0900, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:
> Which brings us to the second topic: the object model.  In Ruby, in the
> spirit of Smalltalk, everything is an object.  In Java, certain data types
> (such as int, float, and double) are "native" while the rest are
> objects.  In Ruby, I guess for optimization purpose, you have put the
> 'int' as an immediate object, at the cost of 1 bit.  Therefore, in the
> future, when 64-bit pointer is very common, will you also put the 'double'
> as an immediate object, and therefore probably approaching the Java model?

'double' is already 64 bits, and so won't fit, unless we do some nasty
manipulation of the mantissa.  We'd instead have to switch to using
floats, which are 32 bits.

Paul