Re:Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD
by torstenvl on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @10:16PM
(#39449760)
That seems non-responsive, as none of those things mean that a pointer and a `long` have the same size. Did you intend to respond to someone else?
Re:Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD
by djao on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @10:17PM
(#39449764)
Google says "There are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the observable universe." Even the lower number is (just slightly) greater than 2^256.
(Imagine installing 2^256 sound cards in a system ...)
It is also likely that general purpose CPUs will use 64-bit integer registers and address spaces for the rest of our lifetimes. Computing has already (for the most part) converged on a standard: Von Neumann architecture, 8-bit bytes, two's complement integers, IEEE floating point, little-endian. The number of oddballs has dramatically decreased over the past few decades and the non-conforming CPUs manufactured every year are already a rounding error.
FWIW If a transition is ever made to 128-bit that will be the last. There aren't 128-bits worth of atoms in the visible universe.