GLIBC 2.16 Brings X32 Support, ISO C11 Compliance, Better Performance

An anonymous reader writes "The GNU C Library version 2.16 was released with many new features over the weekend. The announcement cites support for the Linux x32 ABI, ISO C11 compliance, performance improvements for math functions and some architectures, and more than 230 bug fixes."

Comments

Re:X32

[kantos]

Actually no it's not... Linux has that already and it works just fine, anyone who has gone through the pain of getting flash player to work before the x64 port can tell you. This is actually more similar (albeit with more restrictions) to setting the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO option on the linker in Visual C++. An option you'll notice that comes with a significant warning about interoperability. Microsoft solved this problem by making pointer handling the developer's job, this meant that they could continue to use x86-64 libraries without an issue but all malloc operations would return addresses that are safe to sign extend.

The benefit on windows is that you:

1. Use less ram on an x64 bit OS than a corresponding x86 application would, this is because you won't have x64 threads for each x86 thread you have going, and won't have to load the thunking DLLs
2. In theory could interop with x86 code since your pointers are safe, however this is not supported