Will there be a 5.3.1?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Tue, 2004-Dec-21 11:17:22 +0000, Pete French wrote:
>> I'd really like to see support for the AMD64 architecture become rock solid,
>> too, because 64 bit Athlons are starting to sell at great prices.
>
>Sadly I went back to running i386 on my AMD64's - not because of problems
>with FreeBSD, but because of problems with ports. It seems that theres a lot
>of code out there assuming sizeof(int) = sizeof(long). Which is a shame (and
>also depresses me after living through identical problems with the  16->32
>switch. You might have thought people would heave learnt)

One of the benefits of the AMD64 is supposed to the its ability to
run a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

I recall this being a major problem when I first started working on
DEC Alpha's about 6 years ago but haven't noticed it as much recently.
(Though one project I'm working on started life on PDP-11's and whilst
it's been ported to ILP32, does not like I32LP64).

One problem is that Unix first became popular (outside academia) with
the advent of the 32-bit workstations and then took off with the rise
of Linux on 32-bit i386.  Lots of Unix code has never seen an environment
were sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *) isn't true.

Hopefully things will improve in the future.

-- 
Peter Jeremy