# A plea for int overflow checking as the default

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** question, proposal, integer-overflow\
**Created:** [April 22, 2017, 3:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338 "2017-04-22T15:49:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 63

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**Author:** ![Jean\_Michel](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jean_michel/32/8282_2.png) [@Jean\_Michel](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Jean_Michel)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2018, 12:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338/63 "2018-02-02T12:43:41Z")

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I think your work could be a gate to faster BigInt .  
I would bet that a type Union(BigInt,SafeInt) where you would switch to BigInt on overflow instead of throwing  
an error would be faster than the current BigInt for many computations (which need Big integers, but only infrequently).

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