Why Sigil Switched Primitive Types

Sigil now writes primitive types as Int, Float, Bool, String, Char, Unit, and Never instead of the earlier Unicode glyphs.

Why the Change Happened

The old spellings were visually distinctive, but they performed poorly on the tokenizer that matters most in this repo. Whole-file measurements consistently favored the ASCII forms.

Lowercase and capitalized ASCII performed similarly, so Sigil chose the capitalized set because it strengthens the language's naming distinction between type-level and value-level syntax.

What the Measurements Showed

The benchmark was run on real Sigil files, not isolated symbols. On cl100k_base, the Unicode forms were consistently more expensive than the new spellings, and the difference was large enough to matter across the corpus.

That made this more than a stylistic cleanup. It was a practical token-efficiency change with a clear language-design upside.

Why This Fits Sigil

Sigil is trying to prefer syntax that is cheap, predictable, and visually coherent. The primitive type switch improved all three at once:

• lower token counts
• better alignment with existing tool priors
• a cleaner distinction between types and values

That combination made the migration straightforward to justify.