Is it possible to specify interger size like in other languages?

[the_glitch]

Godot Version

4.3

Question

In most programming languages, you can choose between an int8, int32, etc.

Is this possible in Godot? I really don’t need a 64bit int for what I’m doing so it’d be nice to be able to reduce ram usage.

[gertkeno]

There’s probably a lot of other things eating up ram, you can specify integer size in most any language you want if you write your code as a GDExtension.

[the_glitch]

The thing is, I need a moderately sized array that stores a material type, and a color for each point in the array. 128 bits per point is massive and unnecessary.

[herrspaten]

You can use a packedbytearray, which basically stores single bytes as elements in an array

[herrspaten]

if i may advertise my own script you can use for writing to a packedbytearray:

Custom Data Compression

In the following i’ll present you two scripts, which allow you to create custom data-compression for reducing the data in your save-files or multiplayer-rpc’s. Whats the idea? The idea is to use the PackedByteArray. The scripts use every single bit inside this array to reduce the data to the smallest amount possible. This can be more efficient then var_to_bytes()/bytes_to_var(), IF you know what kind of data you have. e.g.: A boolean will use 8 Bytes when converted with var_to_bytes(), which …

[dragonforge-dev]

I recommend you not do this unless you have a very good reason for it. Modern processors are 64-bit processors. They will actually process numbers stored in smaller amounts of bits (32-bit, 16-bit, 8-bit) slower. So you will incur a performance hit. Having said that, if you’re targeting a device that has a small RAM limit, go bananas.

I’m mainly posting this for people coming along who think they need to do optimizations like this, but aren’t exactly sure why. It’s a lot of extra work and if you do not know what you’re doing, you will end up with more complex code and performance issues to debug.