[Toybox] Fun with the android NDK.

[Rob Landley]

On 09/08/2018 10:46 PM, David Seikel wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 18:43:17 -0500 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> I'm sure we'll come up with new stuff over the next 20 years but
> 
> My Motorola Moto Z phone is basically a "retina display", even taking my
> glasses off and squinting at it with my horribly short sighted vision,
> I can't see pixels.  Strapping it to my head in a Google Daydream is a
> whole other story though, rather low res, not enough resolution to be a
> monitor replacement.  Oculus and friends insist on 90 Hz frame rates, to
> stop people feeling ill, but lower rates work fine for "never gets ill"
> me, YMMV.  4k per eye at 90 Hz frame rate for augmented / virtual
> reality headsets is likely coming soonish.  Then again, tricks like
> foveated rendering will reduce the amount of high res pixels needed
> (tracking what part of the display your eyeball is actually focused on,
> and only rendering that bit in high res).  That's driving things a bit
> for now.

Development's not going to stop. (Heck, they're still managing die size shrinks,
and seem bound and determined to throw money at the problem all the way to
atomic limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Beyond_5_nm . And
there's still plenty of drivers: I mentioned wanting a phone with 64 gigs of
ram. The 128TB of storage the newest SD spec (SDUC) can handle would be nice
too, but we'll see...)

I'm just trying to figure out whether x32 (and whatever the arm equivalent is)
will remain relevant after the y2038 issue takes out legacy unmigrated 32 bit
systems. I suspect it will, and if it survives that it could easily last a
century, 20 years from now the moore's law s-curve's should have flattened the
rest of the way out to a linear rate of advance.

I have some history doing this sort of analysis, but "predictions are hard,
especially about the future". People have a periodic tendency to go "this is
good enough, let's go for cheaper/smaller/lower power instead of more
performance", and as things increase other things become bottlenecks...

  http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#26-06-2011

Rob

P.S. I googled, the arm equivalent is https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64ilp32Port
which is an even sillier name than aaarch64. But presumably has a 64 bit time_t.

P.P.S. Things like x32 become _more_ interesting as the moore's law s-curve
flattens out. It's the kind of advance you care about in a world of linear
performance increases. Thus it seems worth trying to preserve 32 bit support and
fix its issues in toybox...