honestly, the unique advantage of having a 64bits vm/image is that we will stop to have the 32bits as a limit to talk with outside world libraries (not a minor thing, IMO). you may think this is not important, since with some work you can still make everything work, but it is: nowadays more and more systems come just in 64bits, and stay in 32bits will doom us in the medium term. also, we will need a better memory manager, who can manage more than 512m efficiently (in fact, it is possible to manage more now, but it system become... well, clumsy :) it is not just the GC, is all the memory manager who we need to take care about, but this is another problem. Esteban On Jun 27, 2013, at 9:32 PM, kilon <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Just for the notice, because I stirred up the whole discussion about 64 bit pharo.
To my knowledge the whole point of having a 64 bit app is that so that app can access more than 4 GBs of Ram. Is that the case or I have no clue what I am talking about ?
I have read that already Pharo VM has some restrictions on how much ram an image can use. Obviously even for todays standard 4GBs for a single app is a bit excessive but if pharo apps continue to grow in complexity and we start to venture in areas of demanding ram needs , then it wont be hard to brake that 4GB barrier.
In any case maybe before you invest so much effort you must clear up what the real benefits would be for us the users of pharo if pharo goes 64 bit.
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