Proposed spec change: Integer should be treated as :object dtype rather than :int64
translunar opened this issue · 1 comments
This issue follows from #604 (comment).
In the past, guess_dtype()
would take a Fixnum
and auto-assign a dtype of :int64
. Now that Fixnum and Bignum are deprecated, an Integer
may contain values that won't fit in :int64
. Before we can release a new version, we need to adjust Integer
to default to :object
instead.
The other option (bad) would be to check each and every item in an array for :int64
overflow before allocating.
This raises the following question: do we even still want the :int64
dtype, or is it better to just use :object
for anything that looks like an integer?
I'm just revisiting this issue to note that using :object
for integers will (a) speed up compilation, and (b) possibly make it easier for us to support faster element-wise math for float32, float64, and the complex dtypes.