Re: (GAWK) Persistent Memory only works on 64-bit systems?

On 2025-04-19, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:

And I remembered reading somewhere that the PMA feature works on 64-bit
systems (implying that it *only* works on 64-bit systems).

Yes, the README for PMA already says:
"Requirements/assumptions include 64-bit machine words (longs and
pointers) and reasonable page sizes."

So, I'm curious as to *why* this restriction?  Could someone on the dev
team (or other knowledgeable person) comment on this?

You'll need to read Terence Kelly's papers and/or the source code
for a rationale.  It's not really a gawk issue as gawk is simply a
consumer and inherits the limitation from the PMA upstream.

I.e., I tried to find a quick answer and didn't.  Tagged pointers?
*quickly looks over support/pma.c*
Indeed, I see that the lowest three bits of allocated object pointers
are used for flags.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de