[Haskell] GHC 64bit?

[Axel Simon]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 10:20:43AM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
> dons at cse.unsw.edu.au (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:
> 
> > SimonM may want to comment, but at the moment I think GHC is limited to
> > 4G, but only due to lack of 64bit machines/demand on the developers.
> 
> There is an IA64 port somewhere, and I suspect other 64-bit
> architectures as well.  Presumably they support >4Gb?

I wonder if such an effort is worthwhile. If all pointers are suddenly
twice the size then the footprint of a program roughly doubles. Hence to
run a program that that needs more than 4GB of RAM on a 32 bit
architecture you would need more than 8GB of RAM on a 64 bit machine (and
e.g. Apples G5 machines only support 8GB of on-board memory).

It would be interesting if Haskell programs could run in the lower 4 GB 
while running in 64 bit mode. Then you could have large data structures 
(or memory mapped files) in C land.

Axel.