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kotlinlang

Question for the team (and I know I already asked about this a while back, sorry): what's the status of exportability for unsigned numbers?

I actually found quite a challenging issue while building an interoping layer with our mainframe programs, which mostly use unsigned numeric types. It would be nice to represent them in the same way as the C programs.

So, we have a draft design for them and plan to support it (but I don't believe that we will manage to do that till 2.3.20 release).
Please, tell me more about your idea of representing unsigned numbers.

<@U02BK8ABTQF> ah, nice! The current problem we have is we are deserializing bytes representing whole 4-bytes integers, for example, without sign.
To accommodate such values in Kotlin, we are forced to use `Long` and to export them as `bigint`, and then convert them again to `number` for easier consumption.
If instead we were to use `UInt`, we could deserialize to `UInt` and export it as `number` directly, since JS's `number` correctly support the unsigned integer max value.

Using `UInt` in the Kotlin layer also aligns to the "backend", and we're not forced to ask ourselves "is this a `Long` because it's really a long value, or just to support the unsigned range?".

Note that we are in a multiplatform context, where we also have a JVM and mingwx64 implementation.
So I can't assume `Int` is just a JS `number` under the hood.