pending 64bit version of squeak
Stephen Pair
stephen at pairhome.net
Thu Jul 3 19:20:14 UTC 2003
John M McIntosh wrote:
> Now that Apple is going to ship general purpose 64 bit machines I'll
> point out that I'm quite willing
> (with others) to work on a 64 bit version of squeak on a shinny new
> G5. However the only issue
> here is that someone will need to pay for all of this, so if someone
> has some funding, I could use a
> replacement desktop machine and work for the fall/winter of 2003/2004.
>
> :-}
While you're at it, make that two machines. ;)
Seriously though, this would be a great thing to have...Squeak might
even be able to say that it's the first Smalltalk VM. (and probably the
first open source OO VM) that is 64 bit. If you do it, make sure that
an image saved from a 64 bit VM can be loaded into a 32 bit VM
(providing it fits within 32 bits of address space) and vice versa.
That raises another interesting question...presumably, the only real
need for 64 bits (other than perhaps CPU performance) is when your image
grows larger than 4 GB...in an image of that size or larger, I imagine
full GC is going to take quite a while to run. And, at times I imagine
you'd want to collect more than the incremental GC, but without waiting
on a lengthy full GC. Would it be useful in a 64 bit object memory to
introduce more generations?
- Stephen
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|