Re: bookkeeping to prepare for a 64-bit EMACS_INT on 32-bit hosts

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:04:07 -0300
> 
> Let me first say that I'm not terribly excited by this idea of
> a 32+64bit compilation option: ignoring the fact that many 32bit OSes do
> not provide a full 4GB virtual address space to the Emacs process, such
> a change can only bump the limit from 512MB to less than 4GB.
> Of course, it will satisfy some particular uses, but it won't remove the
> fundamental problem.

Well, I beg to differ: I think an eight-fold increase in the size of
files we can visit on a 32-bit system _is_ a big deal.  At least in
the year 2011, files larger than 4GB are extremely rare, while files
larger than 512MB are quite common (I bump into them every day on my
daytime job).