Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!ardent!mac From: mac@rhea.ardent.com (Mike McNamara) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug Subject: 24 bit pointers Message-ID: Date: 1 Jan 90 21:41:30 GMT Sender: news@ardent.UUCP Reply-To: mac@ardent.com (Michael McNamara) Distribution: gnu Organization: Ardent Computer Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 28 As RMS asked that requests for long term features go here, I wish to echo requests for support for greater than 16Mbyte addressing. Most of the machines I use at work have 128Mbyte of physical memory. My main task right now is verifing new chip designs, which we do via a simulation language, and test scripts. The output of these scripts can easily get up to 20-25 megabytes. I have to use vi to look at these files!!!! This is an embarassment. I am quite aware of the memory limitations of the current memory allocation scheme of emacs; I used to use a Sun 3/50. I would strongly support any effort to remedy the memory behavoiur of emacs. However, I eliminated this problem for me personally to a large extent by porting emacs to the Ardent machine, and using it to run emacs. I would be quite willing to suffer making pointers 64 bits, with 32 bits of tag information. People, even emacs mavens, who have emacs running for weeks, might have half a million Lisp Objects running around. Better to require a million bytes to describe these objects, then arbitarily limit the total size of all the objects described to 16 Mbytes. Especailly when there are 4 gigabytes of addressable space!! -- Michael McNamara (St)ardent, Inc. mac@ardent.com