top, fixed buffer length in utils.c

[John Baldwin]

On Sunday, February 15, 2015 11:18:54 pm Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 10:56 PM, <kpneal at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > There
> > will _never_ be a compiler of anything resembling popularity for any
> > established FreeBSD host that has int as anything other than 32 bits in
> > size.
> >
> 
> This is optimistic beyond sanity, based on history. I was making a point as
> well.... Really. People claimed this in the 16-bit days, because the idea
> of something using 32 bits was obviously going to break things and be too
> difficult to cope with. So where are we now?
> 
> There will be 64-bit CPUs, as opposed to 32-bit CPUs with 64-bit
> extensions, in the future. Be certain of this. (Heck, there's already been
> one, albeit not popular: DEC Alpha.) And eventually (unlike the Alpha) the
> native word size will be used as the default word size because people ---
> specifically, developers --- will want that. Which means (int) will change.
> 
> The only constant in the world is change. You can choose to change with it,
> or to pretend that it doesn't/didn't happen. The latter just means you'll
> be left in the dust wondering why the world isn't paying any attention to
> you any more.

I'm not advocating that ints will forever be 64-bits, but I think it will 
probably be quite a while.  If anything, the trend on 64-bit platforms is the 
opposite due to 64-bits being too wasteful for longs and pointers (see x32 for 
x86 and mipsn32).

-- 
John Baldwin