[samatman]

> If I could go back in time and change one thing about the C language, I would add some notion of expanding multiplication.

Zig makes this relatively easy: it has a @mulWithOverflow intrinsic, which returns an overflow bit with the result, and it has integers up to (u|i)65535. So depending on what you're doing, you can either detect overflow and then upcast, or upcast first and then optionally truncate.

It also has saturating multiply as a separate operator *|, or wrapping with *%, for when those are the semantics you want. Otherwise overflow is safety-checked undefined behavior, which will panic in Debug and ReleaseSafe build modes.

[LegionMammal978]

At least on x86, there's no real point in detecting truncation before upcasting, since expanding multiplication yields both the high and low halves in a single instruction. At best, you'd be adding branches that the processor can insert just as well itself. (Unless we're talking about things like 128x128-bit multiplication, which would be a different story; it would likely depend on your expected input distribution.)

As for returning an overflow bit, Rust has had this since forever with its overflowing_OP() methods, and C23 has recently added an <stdckdint.h> header with a bunch of ckd_OP() macros that return an overflow bit.