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