Re: --with-wide-int

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:

>>> So I expect the practical limit to be closer to 1GB.
>> In practice the limit is a bit less than 2 GiB if you're editing
>> one big file.  (I observed this just now, on Ubuntu 11.10 x86,
>> by editing a 1947957328-byte text file.)
>
> Read-only access to a single such file (i.e. starting a new Emacs
> session for that file) is indeed not affected by fragmentation.
>
>> Simple edits and incremental searches are fast;
>
> I'd be surprised if non-simple edits (e.g. insertion of enough text to
> overflow the gap and force a reallocation) works at all.
> It's also to be expected that viewing such a 2GB file will fail if
> you've already viewed a 1GB file in the same session.
>
> I.e. 2GB files will work sometimes, but e.g. for Rmail-style uses (one
> of the more convincing use cases, AFAIK), I don't think 2GB is
> a realistic limit.

Log files produced by various tools are much more interesting that Rmail
(which is not that popular).  Even read-only access is valuable for such
file sometimes.  Is it something people do every day?  Probably not, but
it's very useful when needed.