The future of 32-bit Linux

The future of 32-bit Linux

In my opinion, this is a highly unbalanced article in the sense that it does not mention any of the following items:

• Many (such as: 80% of all) mobile and desktop applications do not require a 64-bit address space in order to function properly, for example:
  • A Bash script that would require more than 1 GiB of memory is highly improbable, thus Bash (which is implemented in C) does not actually require 64-bit pointers in order to function properly
  • Anybody running top/htop on their machine once in a while can clearly see that many apps (random examples: bluetoothd, nm-applet, xscreensaver) consume about 5-30 MiB of memory
• 32-bit pointers are more efficient than 64-bit pointers in terms of how big a working set size can fit into L1D/L2 caches
• The belief that time_t is somehow required to be linked to the size of the address space is false. That is, a 64-bit time_t and 32-bit pointers are perfectly compatible with each other.
• It is possible to have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same library installed on a Linux-based system. In other words, it is very easy for an application developer to freely choose a 32-bit or a 64-bit address space depending on the particular needs of the application.
  • Maybe if clang/gcc made the choice between the command-line options -m32 and -m64 mandatory then it would enable programmers to give it some thought

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