[apologies for the half-finished message that was accidentally sent 
prematurely a few minutes ago...]

> Jiann-Ming Su <js290 at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> But, I still run into the 64-bit problem:
>
> Yes, Squeak VM wants 32-bit int, int *, etc.  I bet gcc can be
> configured on alpha to work in a 32-bit universe; does anyone know of
> the proper flags to achieve this?

gcc2 cannot do this.  I haven't checked gcc3 explicitly, but I bet the 
same reasons that prevented gcc2 from doing it also prevent gcc3 from 
doing it.

The only way (that I know of) to build a VM on alpha is under OSF/1 
using the vendor (DEC aka Compaq aka HP) toolchain, which has a 
"-migrate" option to force all memory regions into the low 32 bits.  I 
used to include a script with the Unix distribution to build on alpha 
([ab]using gcc for the compile and linking with the vendor ld) but 
stopped doing including it (and building alpha binaries with it) when I 
noticed nobody had downloaded a prebuilt alpha VM for over a year.  I 
could probably find this script if it's useful.  (This would only be 
useful on OSF/1.  I haven't read much of the thread, so if we're 
talking about Linux on alpha then I'm afraid you're on your own.)

My recent 64-bit changes do cure this problem, but incur a slight 
performance hit.  (Every oop has to be translated to a pointer during a 
read from object memory, and every pointer translated back into an oop 
during writes into the object memory.)

Ian