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by chubot
1295 days ago
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Yeah it sounds like x32 is really only practical for embedded systems, if anything Limited use of registers in x86 does sound like a good explanation for it being a wash in terms of speed It seems like there is very little language-level support for small pointers. Only the unreleased Jai language seems to have "relative pointers" (or maybe they took this out) The Zig compiler recently replaced pointers with integers in their code representation for memory/speed, but lost some type safety in the process -- i.e. a T* isn't a U*, but indices into t[] and u[] are the same type. I'm not sure I like that tradeoff, and it seems like language-level support would help |
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It definitely _is_ a pain to compile for it.
x32 ABI is not switched on by default on any distro that I'm aware, so you would need to recompile your kernel to get support for it. I think the poor support for it probably is because almost no one is using it. There was even a kernel thread discussing removing support for it.
So, from the point of view of distributing it to end users, x32 ABI is pretty much dead end (for now, *until distros start turning on the flag for it on, for their standard default distribution kernels).
But I would definitely be interested in your results. Most likely, you should see a smaller footprint + a speed boost.