On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 10:56 PM, <kpneal at pobox.com> wrote:> There > will _never_ be a compiler of anything resembling popularity for any > established FreeBSD host that has int as anything other than 32 bits in > size. >This is optimistic beyond sanity, based on history. I was making a point as well.... Really. People claimed this in the 16-bit days, because the idea of something using 32 bits was obviously going to break things and be too difficult to cope with. So where are we now? There will be 64-bit CPUs, as opposed to 32-bit CPUs with 64-bit extensions, in the future. Be certain of this. (Heck, there's already been one, albeit not popular: DEC Alpha.) And eventually (unlike the Alpha) the native word size will be used as the default word size because people --- specifically, developers --- will want that. Which means (int) will change. The only constant in the world is change. You can choose to change with it, or to pretend that it doesn't/didn't happen. The latter just means you'll be left in the dust wondering why the world isn't paying any attention to you any more. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b at gmail.com ballbery at sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
On Sunday, February 15, 2015 11:18:54 pm Brandon Allbery wrote:> On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 10:56 PM, <kpneal at pobox.com> wrote: > > > There > > will _never_ be a compiler of anything resembling popularity for any > > established FreeBSD host that has int as anything other than 32 bits in > > size. > > > > This is optimistic beyond sanity, based on history. I was making a point as > well.... Really. People claimed this in the 16-bit days, because the idea > of something using 32 bits was obviously going to break things and be too > difficult to cope with. So where are we now? > > There will be 64-bit CPUs, as opposed to 32-bit CPUs with 64-bit > extensions, in the future. Be certain of this. (Heck, there's already been > one, albeit not popular: DEC Alpha.) And eventually (unlike the Alpha) the > native word size will be used as the default word size because people --- > specifically, developers --- will want that. Which means (int) will change. > > The only constant in the world is change. You can choose to change with it, > or to pretend that it doesn't/didn't happen. The latter just means you'll > be left in the dust wondering why the world isn't paying any attention to > you any more.I'm not advocating that ints will forever be 64-bits, but I think it will probably be quite a while. If anything, the trend on 64-bit platforms is the opposite due to 64-bits being too wasteful for longs and pointers (see x32 for x86 and mipsn32). -- John Baldwin