Re: [PATCH] Re: Bignum performance (was: Shrinking the C core)

[Gerd Möllmann]

> How do you see only fixnums are used?

By reading the assembly, and remembering a thing or two from my times as 
a CMUCL contributor, e.g. its fixnum representation.  SBCL is a fork of 
CMUCL.

> Are we talking 1 word = 2 bytes = 16 bits here, s2c?
>
> If so, the range of fixnums are -32 768 to 32 767 inclusive,
> so those are hardly huge numbers.

It's a 64-bit machine, more specifically an M1. i.e. arm64.  How you get 
from there to these 16 bits escapes me.