Converting a 'numeric overflow exception' to a 'you eventually run out of memory' failure is much worse, because exhausting memory will cause system-wide impact

Converting a 'numeric overflow exception' to a 'you eventually run out of memory' failure is much worse, because exhausting memory will cause system-wide impact instead of just killing the individual process handling a request/operation. OOM is also generally handled much worse in software vs throwing an exception at the point where data first exceeds the expected range. Do you really want to kick off the linux oom killer every time someone uploads a corrupted png to your server? In general, it's much better to catch out-of-range/corrupt data early, and silently promoting to a 256-bit int is effectively hiding corrupt data in the majority of cases. The maximum 64-bit int is really big.