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

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Tue, 17 Nov 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:

> 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.

The maximum sizes aren't much increased though, as the limit of
process address space will be hit soon after. Which for a 32-bit Linux
typically is somewhere between 2 and 3 GiB. So yes, there are some
file sizes which can be edited in addition, but that range is rather
narrow.

I still think that --without-wide-int is the more reasonable default.
Users who need those big buffers or files can easily flip the option.

Ulrich