Hardware support for overflow detection in BEAM?

[Kent Boortz]

> 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.

We are looking into this at the moment, i.e. we investigate if we can
put back the use of hardware support for arithmetic overflows.

I removed it a couple of years ago simply because the hardware support
for arithmetic overflows in Erlang didn't work correctly. At the time
I blamed the operating system implementations to be incomplete/broken.
On some machines the overflow test cases hang the whole machine, on
others some overflows where caught and others not. I felt that the
extra speed was not worth the danger of crashing an Erlang node.

kent