He can if course make it fast, even very fast but conceptually its hard because he has focused so much work on making floating fast. He uses them as the basic e

He can if course make it fast, even very fast but conceptually its hard because he has focused so much work on making floating fast. He uses them as the basic element on the stack and hiddes pointers in the NaN. Ints dont have NaNs so that approche does not scale that well to more primitives. There are a range of compiler tricks that can make boxed math go fast as well.