[Numpy-discussion] change default integer from int32 to int64 on win64?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's perhaps what you want, but numpy has never claimed to do this.
> The numpy project deliberately chose (and is so documented) to make
> its default integer type a C long, not a C size_t, to match Python's
> default.

This is true, but it's not very compelling on its own -- "big as a
pointer" is a much much more useful property than "big as a long". The
only real reason this made sense in the first place is the equivalence
between Python int and C long, but even that is gone now with Python
3. IMO at this point backcompat is really the only serious reason for
keeping int32 as the default integer type in win64. But of course this
is a pretty serious concern...

Julian: making the change experimentally and checking how badly scipy
and some similar libraries break might be a way to focus the
backcompat discussion more.

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith
Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
http://vorpus.org