On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 5:25 PM, Ben Coman <btc at openinworld.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

A 16-bit version would be killer.  What 16-bit processors are doing well in
the market these days, if any?

_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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