Re: pdumper on Solaris 10

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2024 13:52:09 +0000
> From: Pip Cet <pipcet@protonmail.com>
> Cc: luangruo@yahoo.com, ali_gnu2@emvision.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Which builds except WIDE_EMACS_INT need to use !USE_LSB?
> 
> The only platforms that "need" to use !USE_LSB are those that cannot
> guarantee 8-byte alignment for static objects, which is why I asked
> about those.

That means: none, AFAIK.  At least not given the platforms we
currently support.  So it's little wonder that configuration had
bit-rotten.

> In particular, WIDE_EMACS_INT shouldn't imply !USE_LSB.  That it
> currently does is a very questionable optimization at best (fixnum
> manipulation may be very slightly faster with !USE_LSB, but pointer
> manipulation will be slower and requires extra registers, which is an
> issue on i386).

Where can one find i386 these days, except in a museum?

> (Of course, WIDE_EMACS_INT is almost always a bad deal, anyway.  As far
> as I can tell, the justification for its continued existence is that
> some C code assumes buffer positions are fixnums (and, because we expose
> fixnum-ness to Lisp, some broken Lisp code might do that, too). If we
> had implemented fixnums to be transparent, we could simply remove
> WIDE_EMACS_INT, but that mistake has been made...)

I'm a very happy user of WIDE_EMACS_INT, so bad-mouthing it is not
recommended ;-)

In fact, one of my strongest reservations about the igc branch is that
it will most probably force me to lose WIDE_EMACS_INT.