bug#8884: closed (Re: bug#8884: wide-int crash)

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 18.10.2011 um 07:42 schrieb Paul Eggert:

> Perhaps I'm missing something, but
> this is the behavior I expect.
> SW.tar is too large to fit into that system's memory.
> (A 32-bit machine can't access more than 4 GiB of memory.

It rather looks that *I* am missing some understanding... I thought that the 
use of wide ints on a 32-bit architecture was meant to give it the ability to 
handle larger files. What is the intention of their introduction then? 
Increasing the size of the binary? The Emacs NEWS/Changelog only tells:

        ** There is a new configure option --with-wide-int.
        With it, Emacs integers typically have 62 bits, even on 32-bit machines.

From buffers.texi this text is derived:

           A buffer's size cannot be larger than some maximum, which is defined
        by the largest buffer position representable by the "Emacs integer"
        data type.  This is because Emacs tracks buffer positions using that
        data type.  For 32-bit machines, the largest buffer size is 256
        megabytes.

4 GiB is 16 times that value, quite a bit more. Maths with large numbers, 
greater than 2**28, works. 

--
Greetings

  Pete

Increase the size of your bike by at least *five* inches!