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

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I think it is quite reasonable _not_ to use wide ints by
>> default on architectures with a 32-bit address space.
> +1.

Another +1 here.

My impression from here is that 32bit userlands are becoming the
minority anyway, so they're mostly used on machines with
limited resources (CPU, cache, RAM).

In this context, I think it's wrong to use up more CPU, RAM and cache by
default all the time, just on the off-chance that the user will want to
view a file that happens to fall just within the 512MB to 2GB window.

Would it have ever helped me to build with wide-int?  Yes, maybe a couple
of time over the last few years.  But those are dwarfed by the tens of
times that this would have made no difference because the file was
greater than 2GB anyway.

For those rare >512MB cases, there's GNU ELPA's "vlf" package.  If we
care about users being able to open very large files on 32bit systems,
we should improve that package rather than enable wide-ints by default.


        Stefan