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

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/17/2015 01:08 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> A limit imposed by the machine's word size doesn't seem so arbitrary

Yes, quite so, and that's what --with-wide-int does: it changes Emacs so 
that buffer sizes are limited by the machine word size, instead of being 
limited by some arbitrary truncation of that word size, a truncation not 
imposed by the machine.

> if it can only be surpassed with a significant performance penalty

That's too strict and we have never been that strict.  On the contrary 
we regularly make changes to Emacs that impose a significant penalty -- 
i.e., a penalty that can be measured in a statistically significant way. 
Even the GNU Coding Standard's guideline about allocating data 
dynamically can impose a significant performance penalty compared to 
static allocation, in many cases. But that's OK. We can impose a small 
(albeit significant) performance penalty if this removes an important 
arbitrary limit on a data structure size.