On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 4:12 AM Sven Hartrumpf <hartrumpf@gmx.net> wrote:
 
The proposal came from Andy Lutomirski, and Linus has a justifiable interest
to remove parts from Linux if possible. But they were (are) open to hear arguments
for x32; Linus wrote:

"I'm not opposed to trying to sunset the support, but let's see who complains."
see https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/10/1151

You obviously know more about it than I do, but I've now read the thread and the linked thread from the beginning of x32.  Looks like Linus was never really happy with it.

Does Ubuntu count as non-commercial? :-)

Pretty much.  You can only get a support contract if you have at least 50 seats, says Dr. Google.  That means that individuals and startups (unless they put everyone in the office on Linux) have to treat it as non-commercial.  Lots of them use it anyway, of course.  (I'm distinguishing here between providing x32 and supporting it.)

Red Hat OTOH will take anybody's money.
 
So, my wish would be not to be pessimistic, but to exploit x32 advantages more
aggressively in the world of Scheme and other languages, so that the next round
of the deprecation discussion will have more argumemts for x32 ...
I think that x32 is an opportunity for Scheme (and others).

We need to think carefully about whether we care more about speed or space (the latter effect is larger in Lisp than in most languages).  We also need to think about classes of implementations.  For this purpose I think there are three:

Native compilers, which need to have their code modified to support x32.  These are Chez, MIT, and Vicare.  (Larceny is out of the picture here because its compiler can't generate x86_64 instructions at all.)

Compilers to C.  These are Bigloo, Chicken, Cyclone, Gambit, Hotdog (port of Scheme48), Larceny, MIT, Owl Lisp, Rhizome/pi, RScheme, Scheme->C, SCM, Stalin.  This depends on the degree of x32 support not so much in the C compiler as in the C library.  glibc has full support, musl has issues, newlib, ulibc, etc. I don't know about.  (Cygwin, which I use a lot, has newlib, but of course the Windows kernel doesn't do x32 anyway.)

Bytecode compilers with JIT.  These are Racket and Guile 3.x.

Everything else.


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
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