[plt-dev] Inexact integers

At Tue, 25 May 2010 09:46:56 -0400, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> It is my understanding that the tower  
> consumers a large amount of 'footprint' and I bet there are  
> applications where machine integers are just enough.

In the early days, MzScheme was a little interpreter bolted onto a
numeric system. The numeric system hasn't grown much since, though,
while a macro system, bytecode and JIT compilers, and other runtime
components have grown up around it. The numeric system is now about 10k
lines out of 140k lines of C code (not counting the GC). For
comparison, the implementation of just syntax objects (not the whole
macro expander) is also around 10K.