[gambit-list] Benchmark results for dependency graph calculation by gsc (i586, x86-64, and x32)

Sven Hartrumpf hartrumpf at gmx.net
Tue Sep 10 04:12:30 EDT 2019


John wrote, 2019-09-09 13:15:
> On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 10:55 AM Sven Hartrumpf <hartrumpf at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>  > Of course one important drawback is that you are limited to 32 bit
>  > references and headers, so only 4G RAM can be accessed (at best) and
>  > objects are limited to 16M bytes in size (so forget about reading large
>  > files into a string or computing pi to 100 million digits!).
>
>  Thanks. I forgot to mention these limitations.
>
> In addition: x32 exists only on Linux AFAIK and Linus wants to deprecate
> it.

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

> No known commercial Linux distro supports it.

Does Ubuntu count as non-commercial? :-)

> The issue of deprecation
> was raised last December, and I imagine it will continue to be raised.

They were asking for arguments for x32, and the feedback was not loud enough, I
fear. Many programming language people could have provided arguments, but not
many knew about this discussion. Scheme implementations typically have significant
benefits from x32.
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).

Ciao
Sven




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