Re: bookkeeping to prepare for a 64-bit EMACS_INT on 32-bit hosts

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 29/04/11 18:10, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Stefan Monnier<address@hidden>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii<address@hidden>,  address@hidden
> > Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:04:07 -0300
> >
> > Let me first say that I'm not terribly excited by this idea of
> > a 32+64bit compilation option: ignoring the fact that many 32bit OSes do
> > not provide a full 4GB virtual address space to the Emacs process, such
> > a change can only bump the limit from 512MB to less than 4GB.
> > Of course, it will satisfy some particular uses, but it won't remove the
> > fundamental problem.
>
> Well, I beg to differ: I think an eight-fold increase in the size of
> files we can visit on a 32-bit system _is_ a big deal.


Meh. IMO the aim should be proper lispy bignums. GNU does already have a 
C bignum (and other stuff) library (GMP) [1] that emacs could link 
against, after all!  I think Paul's changes may help somewhat with that 
goal anyway (emacs integers would be further divorced from C ints), just 
saying.


[1] http://gmplib.org/