Re: Making --with-wide-int the default

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
>> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
>> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:31:51 -0500
>> 
>>   >  > Based on this, I'd like to turn --with-wide-int on by default.  Any
>>   >  > last-minute objections?
>> 
>>   > With a very visible description of how to turn it off, please.  Mine is
>>   > apparently still one of these "old slow 32-bit machines" :-(
>> 
>> People who build Emacs should not _have_ to know anything about
>> --with-wide-int.  We should make configure automatically do the right
>> thing on machines that don't support wide ints.
>
> There are no machines we know of that cannot support wide ints.  The
> only problem is that using wide ints produces a somewhat slower Emacs
> (Paul reported a 30% slowdown), so on slow machines this could be
> annoying.

Also the cell size doubles, so the Lisp data structures take more
memory.  I think it is quite reasonable _not_ to use wide ints by
default on architectures with a 32-bit address space.  Everything takes
up more memory, the maximum of virtual address space is something like
3GB anyway so it's not like you could hope to increase the amount of
stuff you could be editing all that much: it is more likely that with
several buffers loaded at once, you'll _decrease_ the overall amount of
stuff you can keep loaded into buffers at the same time.

-- 
David Kastrup