Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 168373
perl is compiled without 64bit int on i386
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:13 EST
Description of problem: perl is compiled without 64bit int on i386 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): perl-5.8.7-0.3.fc5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install perl 2. perl -e 'printf ("%x", 99999999999999)' Actual results: ffffffff Expected results: 5af3107a3fff Additional info: From the INSTALL manual: "The use64bitint option does only as much as is required to get 64-bit integers into Perl (this may mean, for example, using "long longs") while your memory may still be limited to 2 gigabytes (because your pointers could still be 32-bit). Note that the name 64bitint does not imply that your C compiler will be using 64-bit ints (it might, but it doesn't have to). The use64bitint simply means that you will be able to have 64 bit-wide scalar values." http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.6/INSTALL#Run_Configure At least I need 64bit ints for some internal applications that needs to run on both x86_64 and i386.
Hey Chip (or anyone else), what is your recommendation for this to go into rawhide? I don't know anything about the ramifications of what this would cause.
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.