The performance hit when the system has to switch from regular integers to BigInts is likely to be unacceptable in the realtime / safety-critical applications w

The performance hit when the system has to switch from regular integers to BigInts is likely to be unacceptable in the realtime / safety-critical applications where we really care about bounds guarantees. Consider an autopilot system where the execution time massively increases when some critical value exceeds some bounds, and the system can no longer execute in the time required. In floating point systems, this is often experienced when "denormalized" numbers are encountered. In other words, it's not just guaranteed bounds on the value that is required, but bounded (and consistent) execution time.