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

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Tue Sep 10 10:02:59 EDT 2019


On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 4:12 AM Sven Hartrumpf <hartrumpf at 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 at ccil.org
    "Any legal document draws most of its meaning from context.  A telegram
    that says 'SELL HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES IBM SHORT' (only 190 bits in
    5-bit Baudot code plus appropriate headers) is as good a legal document
    as any, even sans digital signature." --me
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