Re: 64bit support
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Mar 03, 2009
- 1060 views
My personal feelings are that 64-bit desktop systems aren't ready for prime time.
Well, some Linux 64bit distributions manage to avoid 32bit binaries altogether. I'd argue that 64-bit desktop systems are ready for prime time since several years. (I use one.) I'd rather have a 64bit Euphoria executable than DOS support. (Hey, it's 2009, who cares for DOS support? 
).
While there are plenty of things that can be done, especially in open source operating systems like Linux, it's only within the last week or so (IIRC) that Adobe released a 64-bit version for Linux. Still no 64-bit joy for other OSes, AFAIK. Most of what I've heard about Windows 64-bit sounds disastrous for typical desktop usage (largely stemming from driver availability and quality issues).
The main benefits of having a 64-bit architecture still seem to be on the server side. Is there much that the typical desktop user would benefit from by switching to a 64-bit architecture? I can definitely see how some niche applications that are very computationally intensive would benefit, but that seems like more of a traditional workstation role, than a desktop.
I certainly agree with you regarding DOS, but others don't. In any case, I don't see DOS support taking away from potential 64-bit support (nor from support of other 32-bit OSes). DOS will be supported as long as there is someone willing to put in the time.
There is likely to be considerable work involved in porting Euphoria to 64-bits. The assumption of 32-bits is very ingrained into the code, and while it's not an impossible task to make the jump to 64-bits, it's far from trivial. And for the record, the assumptions about 32-bits are part of why euphoria is so fast.
Hm, seems to be a bad language design (and implementation)...
In the sense that it isn't easily upgraded to 64-bits, I guess I'd agree with you, but it does what it was meant to do remarkably wellfor the last 16 years or so. I don't think that's a very interesting criterion upon which to judge the design or implementation (I suppose I'd argue that this is more of an implementation issue than language design).
Most of the code is fairly portable (it runs on DOS, Windows [95-Vista], Linux, MacOSX, FreeBSD). I'm not sure if it would be big-endian friendlycertainly things like poke4 aren't. Someone was even able to get most of euphoria working on something running on ARM.
In any case, as I said before, 64-bit support will come as soon as someone is willing (and able) to work on it. I'm not aware of any candidates, currently.
Matt
