Re:Build your own Linux
by ambrop7 on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @03:58PM
(#15030746)
(as already mentioned, ints being 64-bit does not make it any more 64-bit)
It may be just a bit of hacking in the some GCC platform configuration files (I'm guessing), and getting possibly tens to hundreds of packages to work with that change (not all software is written completely portably!).
However there is no good reason to do that. It would literally make things use more memory and slower (as a consequence of the former). Any program that actually needs 64-bit integers just uses int64_t etc..
It may be just a bit of hacking in the some GCC platform configuration files (I'm guessing), and getting possibly tens to hundreds of packages to work with that change (not all software is written completely portably!).
However there is no good reason to do that. It would literally make things use more memory and slower (as a consequence of the former). Any program that actually needs 64-bit integers just uses int64_t etc..