There are many programs in a conventional Linux distro that might reasonably be built using x32. I'd guess that it would be the vast majority.
It would be interesting to build a distro with x32 as the default and only selected programs as full x86_64.
What would benefit from the full pointer width? Programs that might do massive buffering (eg. database programs, Firefox, graphics editors, VM providers). Any others?
The first fallout would be the discovery of stupid portability bugs. So many C programs erroneously assume that pointers can fit in ints. For no serious benefit. This would be all to the good, but the work would fall on the wrong people. A cheap version of this experiment would be to build most things as x86_32 instead of x32. After all, most programs have already been tested in this architecture. But x32 ought to be more performant.
The second result would probably be a modest improvement in disk space for programs. My wild guess: 10%.
I would not be confident that there would be much of a performance improvement since it might turn out that most memory and processor is used by those programs that were left as x86_64. On my desktop, most of the resources are consumed by Firefox most of the time.
It would be interesting to build a distro with x32 as the default and only selected programs as full x86_64.
What would benefit from the full pointer width? Programs that might do massive buffering (eg. database programs, Firefox, graphics editors, VM providers). Any others?
The first fallout would be the discovery of stupid portability bugs. So many C programs erroneously assume that pointers can fit in ints. For no serious benefit. This would be all to the good, but the work would fall on the wrong people. A cheap version of this experiment would be to build most things as x86_32 instead of x32. After all, most programs have already been tested in this architecture. But x32 ought to be more performant.
The second result would probably be a modest improvement in disk space for programs. My wild guess: 10%.
I would not be confident that there would be much of a performance improvement since it might turn out that most memory and processor is used by those programs that were left as x86_64. On my desktop, most of the resources are consumed by Firefox most of the time.
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