> > From: Max Bolingbroke <[email protected]> > > On 4 February 2011 02:35, Steve Severance <[email protected]> wrote: > > Wholly support moving OSX to x64. x86 should be supported only on a > > best effort basis for legacy. > > Moving from x86 to x64 has advantages and disadvantages from my POV. > Advantages: > * Able to address more memory > * More registers for code generation > * Haskell dependencies wouldn't need to be built for x86 on Snow > Leopard (though if we swapped to x64 on Leopard as well, the Leopard > users would start having to build 64-bit libraries specially) > > Disadvantages: > * Pointers become wider, and Haskell data structures mostly consist > of pointers. This will bloat memory use of Haskell programs. > * Generated binaries won't work on older Macs that don't have a > 64-bit OS/CPU. This is important if you are distributing compiled > Haskell binaries, which is not something I personally do but which is > probably important to support > > Did I miss anything? >
I'm moderately in favor of making the primary supported platform x86_64, except for the distribution issue. If i386 were maintained but not necessarily targeted for improvement that would be fine by me. > I don't know if anyone using a 64-bits GHC on e.g. Linux has reported > experience of whether moving to 64-bits is a net win or not from a > performance perspective. My guess is that it is a win for certain > classes of programs (numerically intensive, "high performance > Haskell"), and a loss for programs making extensive use of laziness, > boxed data structures etc. > For my code, x86_64 (OS X) is a net win. It's sometimes significantly faster, and hasn't ever been noticeably slower. The biggest gains seems to be I/O, although I haven't really investigated this. Cheers, John
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