News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly. Parent comment

Re:Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly by skunkworker on Thursday May 14, 2020 @06:28PM (#23186335)
On some platforms like ARM, the transition from 32bit to 64bit(Aarch64) and the improvements to the ISA allowed some software to run much quicker on the same hardware. While the increased memory usage was detrimental if you are running into memory pressure issues, the speed improvements would be well worth the change for most tasks.

When the Pi 3 launched it had a 32bit OS, but switching to 64bit improved the speed from 15 to 30% at the cost of 1.5X larger memory size.[1]

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/03/01/64-bit-arm-aarch64-i...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly by gpm on Thursday May 14, 2020 @06:53PM (#23186584)
There doesn't have to be a choice between a fast ISA, and even 64 bit registers, and using 32 bit pointers/indices. We can do theoretically do both - it's just extremely rare in practice.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly by kllrnohj on Thursday May 14, 2020 @07:35PM (#23187043)
Not rare at all. 32-bit "pointers" in a 64-bit process is relatively common, even, as it's what ART does on Android ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/8231/a-closer-look-at-android... ). And Hotspot has a similar optimization: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/HotSpot/CompressedOops
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly by Dylan16807 on Thursday May 14, 2020 @07:56PM (#23187230)
And it's also common to truncate 64 bit pointers down to 48 bits to pack other info alongside them, since those are the only bits that actually get used on most architectures.
[ Parent | on HN ]