On 29 July 2018 at 05:55, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
>     thanks for this.  I don't want to respond to the tests per se, but I do
> want to address one parenthetical you make.
>
> On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 1:27 PM, Tim Johnson <digit at sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I downloaded an ran the All-in-one and wanted to put it through its paces
>> on Windows 7 32-bit.  (I recognize 32-bit is a dying breed, but
>> nonetheless...)
>
>
> I don't think it is, at least not unless underlying OSs cease to support it.
> Because Smalltalk has infinite precision arithmetic the 32-bit system works
> very well for anything that doesn't require a huge address space.  Because
> in a symbolic processing application the 32-bit implementation will move
> half the data than the 64-bit implementation, the 32-bit version should be
> faster, and so if the application fits within the 32-bit heap there's no
> reason to go to 64-bits; one is simply wasting memory bandwidth.  I no
> longer use the 32-bit system with any regularity, but that's because the VM
> simulator is faster on 64-bits than on 32-bits because it spends a lot of
> time accessing the array (actually a Bitmap or DoubleWordArray) that
> contains the heap, and on 64-bits there's much less overflow into boxed
> integers.  But in this case the application is to a symbolic processing one,
> but a low level bit manipulation one.
>
> So I, and others, hope that the 32-bit system will live for a long time.
> The 64-bit version has its place, and in an increasing number of contexts it
> is required, but it can be overkill, and so there are string benefits to
> maintaining both.  Especially since in Smalltalk we have the infrastructure
> to freely exchange code between the two and are much less dependent on word
> size than programs written in many other programming languages.

A particular case where this applies is Internet Of Things size devices.

cheers -ben