64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register) [LWN.net]

The Register takes a look at a 64-bit Linux port for the Chrome browser. "Google engineers have been beavering away at a 64-bit version of the company's Chrome browser for the Linux platform. According to Chrome developer Dean McNamee, Mountain View's V8 team has been tinkering with a Chromium Linux 64-bit for several weeks now. V8, in case you were wondering, is the web kingpin's JavaScript engine."

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64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 21, 2009 18:52 UTC (Fri) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (5 responses)

That's the problem when you don't develop for 64-bit from the start. Porting from 64 to 32 is much easier than vice versa. Most of the time I even don't even to port anything; it just builds and runs correctly. I thought the Google guys had a clue.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 21, 2009 18:55 UTC (Fri) by dtlin (subscriber, #36537) [Link]

At the very least, porting V8 (their JIT'ing JavaScript interpreter) requires a new x86_64 backend. That seems to be the toughest part; the rest of their source tree looks pretty bitness-independent.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 21, 2009 18:58 UTC (Fri) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

The first priority was Windows, so it had to be 32-bit. 64-bit Windows is far from widespread, since it's a premium system.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 22, 2009 2:22 UTC (Sat) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link]

Also, the Windows 64-bit ABI is different than Linux or OS X. In 64-bit mode, Windows just has 64-
bit addresses, while 'long' is still 32-bits. In Linux and OS X, 'long' and 'size_t' are the same size
whether in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. This difference alone means Windows ports are not automatic,
at least for a JIT compiler.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 21, 2009 21:29 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You forget that Chrome has a JIT-compiler for JavaScript. And it most definitely can't be ported automatically.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 21, 2009 21:30 UTC (Fri) by martine (guest, #59979) [Link]

From the mailing list post: "The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I've had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks."

(Emphasis mine.)

A one-up against Firefox

Posted Aug 23, 2009 19:07 UTC (Sun) by tamasrepus (subscriber, #33205) [Link]

This is a one-up against Firefox, which still doesn't support its own next-gen Javascript interpreter (Tracemonkey) for AMD64/x86-64. See: Bug 489146 - tracemonkey is disabled for Linux x64

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land (The Register)

Posted Aug 23, 2009 20:47 UTC (Sun) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

If you're using the PPA[1], which has just switched to 64 bit, you'll get a lot of crashed tabs unless you use this flag: chromium-browser -disable-javascript [1] https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa