Re: tidy binaries

Never hurts to try.  Tidy has been running as a 64-bit program on Alpha 
Linux for a while, has anyone done a performance comparison?

I have never heard of anyone running out of memory using Tidy.  So the 4GB 
limit for 32-bit systems is not a bottleneck.  Tidy does no floating point 
or "long long" ops.  It works mostly with characters - either MB (e.g. 
UTF-8) or wide (32-bit uint).  Tidy is also pointer intensive.  Thus, the 
memory requirements might increase a great deal.  This can have a negative 
side-effect of less code fitting into the CPU cache at once.

OTOH, in theory, with CPU pipelining and 64-bit memory I/O, tidy could 
benefit a great deal from a compiler that knows about these 
things.  Remember, for files, Tidy spends over 95% of time doing I/O (which 
may benefit from a 64-bit memory path).

My prediction: it will be a wash.  Cory, will you let us know what you find?

At 12:17 AM 5/24/2005 -0700, Terry Teague wrote:
>At 4:21 AM -0700 5/23/05, Cory Nelson wrote:
>
> >IMHO, the idea of casting pointers to typedefed integers (let alone a
> >fixed 32-bit 'ulong') is ridiculous in the first place.  I can
> >understand typedefing int32 and int64 etc but what reasoning was there
> >to do this with very platform specific pointers?  I'd be happy to
> >attempt a patch, but i'm still not 100% familiar with the Tidy code
> >and don't want to break some obscure code that relies on it being an
> >int.
>
>
>Don't blame me <grin>.
>
>
>Can you point out some of the constructs you have concerns with? - I'm not 
>sure what pieces of code you are talking about.
>
>
> > Some fairly complex C++ I have runs in about 1/6th the
> > time on 64-bit, so I'm excited to see if Tidy gets similar benefits.
>
>
>While that may be true for some 64-bit platforms, it is not necessarily 
>true for plain C code (e.g. Tidy), and for example Mac OS X on PowerPC 
>G5.  Unless you are going to be tidying huge data sets (unlikely), there 
>may in fact be disadvantages of going to 64-bit - see :
>
><http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/64bitPorting/intro/chapter_1_section_1.html>
>
>
>Regards, Terry



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