Fedora 9 32 or 64 Bit - Which One?

[Alan Cox]

> Wouldn't you need twice as much memory to have the same 
> memory for applications if you are using double the word size?

Pointers get larger but other values don't. Fortunately most programs are
not made up mostly of pointers.

> 8 bits.  It is my understanding that UTF-8 only uses the 
> second 8 bits if it needs it.  So that is like my second 
> question, making sure that there isn't lots of empty memory.

Floating point values are the same size, strings are the same size, code
is about the same size including most inline constants within the code.
Integers likewise.

The amount of size difference varies by application and usage but it is
usually low. Most big objects in programs (graphics, icons, bitmaps, big
tables) don't get any bigger.

There are one or two obscure cases where some things really do double in
size due to the way they are written - some lisp interpreters for
example, but they are obscure corner cases.

Alan