All Ruby code does this. Mathematics can still be performant because of tagged pointers. If the MSB is set, the value is a Ruby object. If it's not set, the value should be considered a native data type.
Perhaps I should have been more specific. I know that there are languages that have this property. My question is if there are studies on the performance impact. Preferably in a language that is suitable for high-performance applications (like games).
The python example is good here, because originally the Python language had separate types for unbounded-integer and machine-sized-int. This happened as part of the move from Python 2.x to Python 3.x, right along with changing strings from byte-arrays to unicode.[1]
There has been lots of fuss and even pushback about the change to use unicode instead of byte arrays, but I have never heard anyone complain about semantics OR performance of the switch to a single integer type.
