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Firefox Too Big To Link On 32-bit Windows
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox has gotten so large that it cannot be compiled with PGO on a 32-bit linker anymore, due to the virtual memory limitation of 3 GB. This problem had happened last year with 2 GB, which was worked around by adding a/3GB switch to the Windows build servers. Now the problem is back, and things aren't quite that simple anymore."
This only affects the inbound branch, but from the looks of it new code is no longer being accepted until they can trim things from the build to make it work again. The long term solution is to build the 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system.
It's a status tooltip instead. It pops up in one of the bottom corners, displaying the same info that would have been in the status bar in the past.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
1) What the hell are you doing with your code to be that large?
2) What the fuck is your linker doing to do that?
3) Why the hell didn't you see this coming and prune LONG before you hit the 3Gb limit if you already hit the 2Gb limit once already?
4) What's the problem with compiling on 64-bit computers only, so long as you're still building and distributing a 32-bit version? Nobody's ever claimed that everyone who runs the programs should be able to compile it on the same hardware.
5) Although I'm sure there are many projects that honestly need that amount of RAM to compile, closed or open-source, I can't believe that Firefox is really one of those. I wouldn't expect Windows to build on a 4Gb machine, for instance, but I would expect to be able to build 99% of it on such a machine and have it dynamically load the parts as needed (so the program is actually built up of many small, independent modules distributed as, say, DLL's and a small executable that loads them - each could easily compile on 2Gb systems).
You're honestly telling me that Firefox is more complicated and needs more memory to compile than, say, LibreOffice? The Linux kernel? Ghostscript? KDE? I call bullshit. Crappy code modularisation, or crappy compiler/linker. In this case, it looks like both.