On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:

On 16.11.2009, at 23:40, Eliot Miranda wrote:



On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
On 15.11.2009, at 03:46, Travis Kay wrote:

>  I would like to see [..] 64bit (image too)

Curious: what would you do if you could have a huge image?

One answer is what VW customers do with 64-bits.  Travis & Martin can give more up-to-date answer on this but IIRC a number of VM customers had images that were pushing the 4Gb limit.  One was Quallaby.  They did a network monitoring app that had huge numbers of large integers in a graph representing the state of the network.  EZBoard wanted 64-bit images because their message-board architecture was too monolithic.  GemStone had/have customers hitting 32-bit limits on numbers of objects.  So I'd sum up as large enterprise apps.  Travis, Martin, what's the current demand like?

I can't quite imagine Squeak's GC giving satisfying performance with such a large object memory.

I concur :)  But that's partially my next target, both to have a more efficient object representation (class decode is very slow with the current one, we could do with immediate characters and in 64-bit immediate Floats) and to provide pinning for the threaded FFI.  Its probably hubris to imagine the product will scale to > 4Gb but I hope it won't be any worse :)



- Bert -