[cpeterso]

There was a golang proposal to change Go's default int type to arbitrary precision big int. It would avoid overflow bugs, but the proposal was closed (after eight years) due to concerns about compatibility reading serialized data and performance.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19623

[IshKebab]

IMO that's one of the few good decisions Python made. You simply don't have to think about overflow, underflow, signed or unsigned.

But I'm not sure it makes sense in a language like Go where they actually care about performance.

[Groxx]

as much as I'm not really a fan of Go, and I would love to spend some time in a language that defaults to unsigned ints by default to see just how pleasant or painful it really is, I do think Go makes a reasonable tradeoff here.

signed ints are rather obviously the majority decision, so that default is defensible, and their const / compile-time math is arbitrary precision. so as long as you can describe your math as either wholly const or can move all overflow-risky stuff into a const equation, you're good - Go's compiler will fail if it exceeds the bounds of whatever number you try to cast it to (implicitly or explicitly).

ignoring fun with float rounding, of course.