[Gcl-devel] Re: 32bit GCL

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  Wonderful to hear from you too!

"Warren A. Hunt Jr." <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Camm,
>
> It's good to hear that you are back at work on GCL.
>
>   It appears we're getting close to a gcl release.  You might recall out
>   [typo?; probably should be be "our"]
>   having used static builds in the past to enable 32bit linux machines
>   to use up to 3gig memory as opposed to the usual 1gig limit (imposed
>   by the load address of shared libraries.)  Warren told me at one time
>   that this was useful in getting the most out of 32bit, especially as
>   64bit comes with its own overhead of bigger pointers.  In addition,
>   the binary of course is completely portable.  Is this important to
>   support?  There appear to have been some libc developments which will
>   have to be worked around to get it working now.
>
> I believe there will be interest in 32-bit computing
> for many years to come; I believe the embedded world of
> computing will become almost entirely based on 32-bit
> ARM and X86 platforms.  The number of embedded systems
> (phones, tablets, set-top boxes, utility meters, etc.)
> far exceeds the number of general-purpose computing
> systems.  For instance, the device that measures the
> electric power used in my home is an embedded Linux
> system running on a Pico ITX board with a X86
> processor.  So, for embedded computing, I think getting
> what one can from the 32-bit X86 architecture is
> valuable.
>
> Some years ago, Boyer and I didn't have ready access to
> 64-bit computers so we were motivated to get as much
> out of our 32-bit computers as possible.  However, now
> even my laptop contains a 64-bit (Intel Core 2 Duo)
> microprocessor with 8 GBytes RAM, so now I always work
> on a 64-bit machine.  Therefore, I don't expect to be a
> future customer of 32-bit GCL for general-purpose
> computing.
>

Good thing then I guess that I put in the extra work to get 64bit
working on the mac.  There is a special configure option needed as
explained in README.macosx.  The standard configure tools detect the
box as 32bit by default.

In any case, this mac stuff appears done now.  If anyone finds it
useful enough to try it out and report back, that of course would be
great.  No need of course unless it is of genuine use to some real mac
user. 

Take care,

> Cheers,
>
> Warren
>
>
>
>

-- 
Camm Maguire                                        address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah