[Haskell-cafe] 64-bit vs 32-bit haskell platform on Mac: misleading notice on Platform website?

[Johan Tibell]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Carter Schonwald
<carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
> To the best of my knowledge there is absolutely no reason to use the 32bit
> haskell on OS X (aside from memory usage optimization cases which likely do
> not matter to the *typical* user), and the community should probably update
> the recommendation to reflect this.

The source of the recommendation are the benchmark results presented here:

http://mtnviewmark.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/32-bits-less-is-more/

Note that it's very common to run other GC:ed languages, such as Java
and Python, in 32-bit mode whenever possible. 32-bit almost halves the
memory footprint and thus shortens GC pauses, in particular major
ones, which are O(n) in the size of the heap.

The problem of missing 32-bit C libraries might be a good reason for
us to recommend 64-bit though and leave the 32-bit recommendation to
people who know what they are doing.

Cheers,
Johan