C64 BASIC is kind of a mess, there's zero support for graphics and sound. Your code rapidly becomes a giant pile of POKEs and PEEKs, and all your operations become absurdly slow because all the math routines are floating point only, so there's a ton of integer/fp conversion overhead on something as simple as "peek a memory location, AND/OR it with a few values taken from variables stored as floating point, poke it back".
Assembly becomes really attractive really quickly.
C64 Basic did have integers.
A floating point
A$ string
A% int
as you would expect ints are quicker.
Err, ints are internally stored as floats as well and that leads to some really interesting performance quirks where you'd not expect.
There were BASIC compilers for C64 which generated significantly faster code just because they actually used ints for integer operations.