Year 2038 preparations in 3.17

Posted Aug 7, 2014 15:03 UTC (Thu) by rriggs (guest, #11598)
In reply to: Year 2038 preparations in 3.17 by Villemoes
Parent article: Year 2038 preparations in 3.17

It is possible that the notion of fixed-length native data types will be considered quaint by the time 2262 is near, just as the idea of fixed-width character sets is today.

Year 2038 preparations in 3.17

Posted Aug 7, 2014 19:37 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Possible. But not likely.

I see it as more likely that everyone programs to a intermediate language like the LLVM or .NET IR instead of native machine code and that IR language uses infinite width data types.

By 2262 if we still program computers at all, we're probably writing in an abstraction layer that is many levels away from the real machine.

However, the real hardware is going to have a real number of wires, and the number of wires connected to the data bus is going to define the pointer size, and the number of gates built into the ALU is going to define the real native data word.

I suppose it is also possible that instead of bytes computers change to using bit streams because all of the data transport changes over to high-speed 1-bit serial. I am not quite sure how that would work, exactly, but I could imagine it.