Re: Making --with-wide-int the default (was: Dynamic loading progress)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 02:55:47 +0200
> Cc: Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>, 
> 	p.stephani2@gmail.com, Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>, 
> 	Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>, Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> > Please don't assume that --with-wide-int is some rare marginal use
> > case. I configure Emacs with it all the time, and intend to suggest
> > that 32-bit builds at least on MS-Windows always use it.
> 
> Why isn't it the default, then (for 32-bit builds)? Are there any downsides?

If there is a downside, I haven't found it yet (on MS-Windows).
There's some slowdown, but it all but disappears in an optimized
build.  And being able to have a 2GB buffer instead of 512MB maximum
is IMO worth that.  61-bit integer arithmetics is also nothing to
disregard easily.

To make it the default for all 32-bit builds, we should make sure it
works well on the other supported platforms.  Perhaps Paul could tell
which platforms he found this to work on, and then we could decide.

In any case, the time to make the decision is NOW, because this will
need time for us to be sure any serious bugs are fixed before Emacs
25.1 is released.