Hi All, Am 11.12.2007 um 12:54 schrieb Jochen Küpper:
Hi Everybody,
On 11.12.2007, at 12:23, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
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I totally agree with Ryan's argumentation on avoiding to many distinct lines of binaries and would suggest the people that are interested in 64 bit support or willing to help, extend +universal to include 32 bit and 64 bit binaries for PPC and Intel, all at once.
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if indeed 64-bit binaries are useful to have
Well, I have been running numerical simulations on 64 bit machines/ OSs already for more than ten years (starting with DEC AlphaStations at the time) because they run considerably faster on the 64 bit architecture or wouldn't run on 32 bit at ll (for memory constraints).
I have not yet done that on Mac OS X but currently use 64-bit variants of Linux, but I do see the use and actual need for 64 bit support on Mac OS X. Especially for some of the nice numerics tools in MacPorts!
Therefore, I think we should strongly consider to support 64 bit in some way. See above for my standpoint on Ryan's email. I would agree that we need 64-bit support as many work cutting edge and 64-bit is needed.
As a side-node: I wonder when we finally get rid of 32 bit and, moreover, when we get 128 bit floating point hardware back (Mr Cray, are you still around;)
Well, lets see we had the 6502 in the 80s, a little later 16 bit, the 90s had 16 and 32 bit, 64 is now becomming the standard so I would guess we will 128-bit in about another 15-20 years. regards Keith.