Motivation for bigint

[eqrion]

I see this line bigint were requested by the wasm_of_caml toolchain.

Is there an elaboration on this somewhere? bigint usage (and especially performance sensitive usage) is pretty rare AFAIK.

Also, why are all the bigint arithmetic operations required, but none are required for number?

[sjrd]

I see this line bigint were requested by the wasm_of_caml toolchain.

Is there an elaboration on this somewhere? bigint usage (and especially performance sensitive usage) is pretty rare AFAIK.

That came from @vouillon at WebAssembly/design#1558 (comment). Admittedly not very emphasized. @vouillon perhaps you would like to elaborate here?

Also, why are all the bigint arithmetic operations required, but none are required for number?

For numbers, Wasm core has all the operations. ;-) Well except x | 0 (ToInt32) and x % y (fmod/fprem), but it was argued that they should be in core if we want them, so I took them out of this proposal already.

[vouillon]

I was listing the JavaScript APIs that I was using. I agree that bigints are probably not performance sensitive and could be left out of this spec.

[sjrd]

Oh. Then it's probably best to leave them out, indeed.