Re: 64bit Euphoria
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Apr 19, 2010
- 1868 views
I had looked at using extended precision floating point types (80bit floats or GCC's "long double" type) but it turns out that neither MSVC or Watcom C support it.
I realize that this leads to the obvious problem of a 64bit Euphoria only being supported on the Unix ports. I figure that between now and 2028, someone will release a 64bit version of Watcom or at least a Watcom library that adds support for quadruple or extended precision float point types, which will make a 64bit Windows port possible...
Although 63 bit integers (actually, much smaller) may be sufficient even so, given that MS restricts you to 16 terabytes of virtual memory, far less than a full 64-bit pointer could address.
Matt
The problem here is is whether or not 16 terabytes will fit into a 53bit integer (the largest integer values that can be represented by a 64bit floating point number). If 64bit float points can't hold those addresses, then the issue of having atoms used to hold memory addresses from legacy code can't be address. (Although some backhand envelop math suggests that 16 terabytes will easily fit into a 64bit floating point number...)
In any case, being stuck with 64bit floats and 63bit integers still breaks the assumption that an atom can hold any value that an integer can.
