OpenEuphoria

Re: 64 bit Eu?

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Nov 24, 2003
• 450 views

Ken Rhodes wrote:
> I recall Rob saying he would port Euphoria to 64 bit
> when there was the demand for it.  So here it is Rob,
> I am demanding that you port Euphoria to the AMD
> Athlon 64!  :) :) :) :) :)

If it's running XP, I wonder if that's Microsoft's
standard 32-bit XP, in which case the machine is rarely
operating in 64-bit mode. MS has a 64-bit XP but I think
it only runs on Intel's 64-bit machine so far.

> I have a few questions...
> 
>  1.  Will you support the AMD 64bit cpu, or the Intell
> 64 bit cpu, or both?

I assume that both those machines will run today's
Euphoria as is. Eventually I would like to take
advantage of 64 bits, but I don't think the advantages
are that great in most cases. Think about all the pointers
and integers in a program suddenly expanding to 8 bytes
each instead of 4. That would waste a lot of memory
and hurt caching performance. How many people have apps
that require over 4 Gb of RAM? How many people have
integer values that need to exceed 4 Gb?

Some specialized code, e.g. graphics, might run faster
when 64 bit integers can be used instead of 32-bit.

>  2. Since the Linux operating system and GNU
> development tools are essentially free will you port
> Eu to 64 bit Linux first?

That's very likely.

>  3. Will a 64 bit implementation of Eu run twice as
> fast as 32bit?  If not, how much of a performance
> increase would you anticipate or hope to realize?

I'd expect a slight performance *decrease* from the
32 to 64 bit change itself, though of course newer
processors are always cycling faster.

>  4. Beyond any improvements in "speed" what other
> advantages might a 64 bit implementation of Eu have
> over 32 bit Eu? 

The big one is memory. You'd be able to access over
4Gb of RAM, assuming you had that much.

>  5. Since Euphoria is such a small, yet powerful
> language, shouldn't it be easier to port than many
> other of the more established, yet larger languages,
> with which it competes?

Yes, Euphoria should be easier to port, and Euphoria
programs should be easier to port since they don't
know much about the underlying hardware. There are lots
of C/C++ programs out there that will break badly,
because someone assumed that integers and pointers
would always be 4 bytes.

Regards,
    Rob Craig
    Rapid Deployment Software
    http://www.RapidEuphoria.com