[Bug 168373] perl is compiled without 64bit int on i386

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Summary: perl is compiled without 64bit int on i386


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=168373


jvdias at redhat.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEEDINFO                    |CLOSED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX




------- Additional Comments From jvdias at redhat.com  2005-11-01 19:25 EST -------
When you are running perl on a 64-bit machine, and have installed the 64-bit
architecture version, ie. on x86_64, perl-*.x86_64.rpm, not perl-*i386.rpm, 
then you do get 64-bit integers by default:
e.g. on an x86_64, with perl*.x86_64
$ rpm -q perl --qf '%{ARCH}\n'
x86_64
$ perl -e 'print ( 1 <<32, "\n" );'
4294967296

The 64bitint feature is meant to provide support for 64bit integers on 32 bit
platforms, and has been associated with severe problems in the past.

Using 64-bit integer emulation on 32-bit platforms would incur a heavy 
performance penalty for ALL applications, even those that make no use
of 33+bit integers. 

It is also made redundant by use of the 'use bigint' pragma, which you can
specify on the command line with -Mbigint, or in the environment of for your
perl scripts on 32-bit platforms with the environment variable setting
 PERL5OPT=-Mbigint 
e.g, on an i386 machine:
$ rpm -q perl --qf '%{ARCH}\n'
i386
$ perl -e 'print ( 1<<32, "\n");'
1
$ PERL5OPT=-Mbigint perl -e 'print ( 1<<32, "\n");'
4294967296

Since there are many workarounds, and we don't want to incur a performance
penalty for all perl scripts, and there have been problems with -D64bitint,
I don't think we should enable this feature unless absolutely required - sorry.

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