Re: Making --with-wide-int the default

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Kastrup writes:

 > Instead of going to 64-bit unilaterally it would seem to make more
 > sense to me to degrade gracefully into gmp.  GUILE does that, I
 > think that XEmacs or SXEmacs can do it,

XEmacs can't handle greater than 1 GB buffers on a 32-bit machine.
Yes, when bignums are enabled Lisp arithmetic will automatically
overflow to bignums (and bigfloats), but internal accounting for text
objects uses EMACS_INTs, not Lisp integers.  At one time there were
several users who preferred XEmacs to Emacs because they were
routinely manipulating 512MB+ buffers and files.

If you just want big Lisp integers, yes, bignums are nice.

To be honest, I don't think it's a good idea to use bignums for
internal indexes into text objects.  1 exabyte buffers should be
enough to keep even the full archives of emacs-devel with room to
spare for a while.