On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 07:28:48AM +0100, Connor Lane Smith wrote:
On 12 June 2010 07:16, Kris Maglione <maglion...@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, my original message was in response to:
On 11 June 2010 21:15, Anders Andersson <pipat...@gmail.com> wrote:
2GB might be silly now, much as 2MB
was silly 20 years ago. I can't see why it would be extraordinarily
silly to read in/map 2GB from a file 10 years from now.
Your original response was that size_t can be redefined, and the
entire content of my response was that it's irrelevant.
Do you honestly believe in 10 years most computers will remain 32 bit,
with a maximum of 4GB of memory? Do you not think libraries may
evolve? Well, okay I guess - it must still shock you that Unix is no
longer 18 bit!
Of course most computers will be 32bit or less in 10 years. I've
got about 6 32bit ARM processors in my house alone, compared to
2 64bit x86 processors, and they all have far less than 4GB of
RAM at their disposal, and I only see that trend continuing.
Most new desktops by that time will probably be 64bit with more
than 4GB of RAM, and quite a lot of people will still be using
the same 32bit desktops they have now.
But I'm frankly not interested in fluffy notions about the
future, because they're irrelevant. My entire point was that we
weren't talking about a practical limitation. The read operation
can only fetch data the size of half of the entire addressable
memory space of a given machine in one call — which has no
practical implications whatsoever.
--
Kris Maglione
Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically
doomed to fail.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
