Hardware support for overflow detection in BEAM?

[James Hague]

As best I can tell from the BEAM sources (there *is* a lot of code :)
overflow for fixnums and the like is detected manually before, in the case
of addition, adding the numbers together.  Has anyone tried modifying this
to just do the math, then check the overflow bit after the fact?  Seems like
this would be a win on the x86, though I can't say for sure about
processors.

James