Hello, The work to port Pharo to 64 bits has started.
The new memory manager Spur will be ported to Pharo 4 alpha next week and it supports 64 bits (this is fresh news, it has been decided 3 hours ago). This was one of the main issue for the 64 bits port. Now the status is to finish to port the memory manager and to compile the VM for 64 bits. There is a bit a debugging to do as even if the 64bits Spur memory manager is implemented it has never been debugged. In addition, some plugins are 32 bits dependent and that needs to be fixed. At this point, which should be in the late summer if Esteban and Eliot are very productive, we should have a 64 bits stack VM. Then there are 2 remaining points, one is to port the JIT to support x86_64 bits and the other is to add faster floating pointer in 64 bits. Adding fast floating pointer is important as 64bits images are typically 30% slower than 32bits ones due to Pharo computation being mainly pointers computation, and that manipulating 64 bits is more expensive than 32 bits. At this point, which is probably around christmas if everything goes well, we should have a 64bits Cog VM. Now this is the optimistic planning. It may be that we have the 64 bits Stack VM for Christmas and the 64 bits Cog VM in a year. It depends if you prefer the optimistic or the pessimistic planning. Right now, people have issue with 64bits vs 32bits in Linux (I saw several reports on the mailing list) but it seems it is not a problem in Windows and Mac. Microsoft and Apple may be providing better support for 32 bits. I don't know. I don't know about the working keypad. Perhaps someone more aware could help. 2014-05-14 21:08 GMT+02:00 Hilaire Fernandes <[email protected]>: > Yesterday my boss asked me to see DrGeo on his Ununtu 14.04LTS 64 bits > machine. I could not get it working, 32 bits compatibility package to > run 32bits application on 64bits system is gone, you have to find out > manually the needed 32 bits libs and install it. > > Now I don't want to face this situation anymore, I want to provide with > DrGeo a VM for each word size, compiled with not recent libc et al. and > a working keypad. It is the bare minimum to not look ridiculous. > By the way, the situation would have been equally ridiculous showing > Pharo3. > > Now, I wonder, how is deal the 32bits/64bits situation on Windows and > Mac OSX? > > Hilaire > > > -- > Dr. Geo http://drgeo.eu > > >
