alt Hacker News> But what I do not believe is that there is a real need for a non-wrapping non-negative integer type.
So the most obvious counter example is so obvious you might not even have remembered it's a type, the unsigned 8-bit integer or byte.
But frankly if you don't have the wrapping mistake they just make for a pretty good general purpose index, they're a useful counter, there's a reason we called these the "Natural numbers".
I am not convinced. A byte is for low-level accessing of memory, you shouldn't really do any computation with it, except maybe low-level bit-fiddling or crypto, but then the non-wrapping non-negative inter is not correct either.
Natural numbers are nice, but then we invented zero and negative number so we got a group structure for addition which is really useful. Because even for a counter, or some index, you may want to to addition and subtraction and then you definitely do not want a non-wrapping non-negative integer for intermediate results.
And the rust design with unsigned type where subtraction does not return a signed type but may fail at return or silently produce the wrong results, seems the worst possible design imaginable to me.