Re: Use of "long" in incremental sort code

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 12:47 PM James Coleman <jtc331(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> But wouldn't that mean we'd get int on 32-bit systems, and since we're
> accumulating data we could go over that value in both memory and disk?
>
> My assumption is that it's preferable to have the "this run value" and
> the "total used across multiple runs" and both of those for disk and
> memory to be the same. In that case it seems we want to guarantee
> 64-bits.

I agree. There seems to be little reason to accommodate platform level
conventions, beyond making sure that everything works on less popular
or obsolete platforms.

I suppose that it's a little idiosyncratic to use int64 like this. But
it makes sense, and isn't nearly as ugly as the long thing, so I don't
think that it should really matter.

--
Peter Geoghegan