honestly, the unique advantage of having a 64bits vm/image is that we will stop to have the 32bits as a limit to talk with outside world libraries (not a minor thing, IMO). you may think this is not important, since with some work you can still make everything work, but it is: nowadays more and more systems come just in 64bits, and stay in 32bits will doom us in the medium term.
also, we will need a better memory manager, who can manage more than 512m efficiently (in fact, it is possible to manage more now, but it system become... well, clumsy :) it is not just the GC, is all the memory manager who we need to take care about, but this is another problem. Esteban On Jun 27, 2013, at 9:32 PM, kilon <[email protected]> wrote: > Just for the notice, because I stirred up the whole discussion about 64 bit > pharo. > > To my knowledge the whole point of having a 64 bit app is that so that app > can access more than 4 GBs of Ram. Is that the case or I have no clue what I > am talking about ? > > I have read that already Pharo VM has some restrictions on how much ram an > image can use. Obviously even for todays standard 4GBs for a single app is a > bit excessive but if pharo apps continue to grow in complexity and we start > to venture in areas of demanding ram needs , then it wont be hard to brake > that 4GB barrier. > > In any case maybe before you invest so much effort you must clear up what > the real benefits would be for us the users of pharo if pharo goes 64 bit. > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/Pharo-dev-How-do-can-we-set-up-a-crowdsourcing-for-pharo-tp4695637p4695793.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >
