Easier? Hardly.

Easier? Hardly.

Posted Aug 16, 2009 6:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (guest, #9252)
In reply to: Crypto is not a big part of life by dlang
Parent article: A default desktop for openSUSE?

second 80286 16 bit systems had 24 bits of address space thanks to segmentation, so it could address up to 16M of ram, it was only after that that you _had_ to get a 32 bit processor (and even then you could fudge it with the hardware equivalent of PAE addressing)

so the move to 32 bit happened while system memory was still 1/4 what could be addressed by the processor.

You have a point - it means mass migration to 64bit is just around the corner: when 16GiB of RAM will be norm 64bit kernel will be norm. And just like then 32bit programs will be used for years after that point.

should a distro compile perl for 32 bit or 64 bit? how are they going to know that I am going to run my log analysis scripts on this system and consider a 64 bit perl important?

That's why it's important to have 64bit versions for different programs. For example Windows Vista does include 64bit version of MS IE and sizable list of other programs - even if hardly anyone uses them right now.

it is _so_ much easier to just move everything over to 64 bit.

What's the rush?

there are some things that don't work on amd64 systems, but those are closed-source plugins (stand-alone binaries have very few problems), and those same plugins won't work on arm, sparc, powerpc, etc.

Exactly: because "these same plugins" only work on IA32 "arm, sparc, powerpc, etc" are now extinct on desktop. Even much-hyped newcomer (I mean Itanic) went the same way. If you want to kill Linux too - feel free to force "pure 64bit" mode.

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