On Saturday 29 January 2005 07:09, William Kenworthy wrote: > On a local lug, a statement was made that not a lot of 64 bit software > is available for the amd chips yet. With gentoo at least, isnt this > largely untrue: if you have the arch set correctly, are you not building > 64 bit software, and only 32 bit where 32 bit specific instructions are > specified???
You are right. There is a small problem, though. Many developers (I am not talking about the gentoo developers but those of the original software) make assumptions which are true on 32-bit systems only. Like sizeof( int ) == sizeof( void * ) or such. Or they assume that long has a certain size while the C/C++ standards only specify: 16 bit <= short <= int <= long <= long long Such software will compile (probably with a bunch of warnings) but won't run properly. Fortunately, this becomes rarer nowadays. > > An what about the 64 bit binary distros??? I ran SuSE AXP on a DEC Alpha for quite a while. While it usually ran fine, there were a couple of quirks. GIMP for instance used to crash quite often (that was years ago, GIMP is now 54-bit clean AFAIK). Some ethernet drivers (3com if I remember correctly) hung the box regularly. > > Seems to be more a microsoft viewpoint. Well, let's say it's a closed source point of view. Word Perfect for Linux, as an example, never ran on anything else than 32-bit Intel (and compatibles). Uwe -- Alternative phrasing of the First Law of Thermodynamics: If you eat it, and you don't burn it off, you'll sit on it. http://www.uwix.iway.na (last updated: 20.06.2004) -- [email protected] mailing list
