x32 abi in future?

[vcunat]

It seems a good thing for the most common (desktop) use cases. https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ Probably report your interest/ideas here. Some mainstream distros are starting to support it (Gentoo, Debian), so pushing it to nixpkgs should not be so much work.

[shlevy]

Any benchmarks for common use cases?

[bluescreen303]

https://lwn.net/Articles/548838/

While the higher performance (compared to x86 and x86_64) in every (perhaps contrived) benchmark is nice, it's especially the far lower memory footprint that interests me.

RAM isn't cheap with most cloud/VPS providers.

[vcunat]

The only significant difference against x86_64 are 4-byte pointers (and "long" C type), which can increase speed due to saving cache space (but that IMO depends on particular case a lot). It's speculated that VMs like python and haskell would have larger benefits, as they maintain lots of pointers. I could find almost no benchmarks, though (e.g. a few days ago someone using it on debian wrote it is faster, but this is all quite vague).

[Profpatsch]

(triage) To we already have that?

[vcunat]

We don't, but x32 doesn't seem really worth the effort in this general-purpose nixpkgs case. Maybe for particular packages or use cases. It would take lots of resources to maintain (whole) nixpkgs for yet another "platform".

Thanks for pinging me; I recently remembered I wanted to close this, but I wasn't at a computer at that time and forgot afterwards.

[vcunat]

32-bit firefox does save memory noticeably, which is why I commonly used it on my 4GiB-RAM systems (I have more RAM now); IIRC it/upstream didn't support x32abi when I last checked (perhaps most hopeful link).

[Ericson2314]

I do want to have hydra.nixos.org cross compile the whole world to some platform, say post 17.09. Doesn't really matter what the target platform is, so this could be it.

[Ericson2314]

@volth like a minimal NixOS system? I haven't tried. Also, currently cross compilation is fairly broken pending #26805.

[Ericson2314]

Heheh, I wish it was! But still getting the stdenvs to build, and then I need to rewrite the docs, and finally others need to review.

[aviallon]

Hello, I am still interested by this, and since cross-compilation improved a lot recently, I wonder if this could be added back on the table...
What I'm most interested in is improving resource usage on several memory constrained systems.
Having NixOS support this ABI would probably have an interesting impact on this ABI's usage, since it would make maintaining systems using it much easier.