"Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On Wednesday 09 March 2011 17:56:13 Walter Bright wrote: >> On 3/9/2011 4:30 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote: >> > Much as I'd love to have a 64-bit binary of dmd, I don't think that the >> > gain is even vaguely worth the risk at this point. >> >> What is the gain? The only thing I can think of is some 64 bit OS >> distributions are hostile to 32 bit binaries. > > Well, the fact that you then have a binary native to your system is > obviously a > gain (and is likely the one which people will cite most often), and that > _does_ > count for quite a lot.
Specifically? > However, regardless of that, it's actually pretty easy to > get dmd to run out of memory when compiling if you do much in the way of > CTFE or > template stuff. Granted, fixing some of the worst memory-related bugs in > dmd will > go a _long_ way towards fixing that, but even if they are, you're > theoretically > eventually supposed to be able to do pretty much anything at compile time > which > you can do at runtime in SafeD. And using enough memory that you require > the 64- > bit address space would be one of the things that you can do in SafeD when > compiling for 64-bit. As long as the compiler is only 32-bit, you can't do > that > at compile time even though you can do it at runtime (though the current > limitations of CTFE do reduce the problem in that you can't do a lot of > stuff at > compile time period). > > In any case, the fact that dmd runs out of memory fairly easily makes > having a > 64-bit version which could use all of my machine's memory really > attractive. And > honestly, having an actual, 64-bit binary to run on a 64-bit system is > something > that people generally want, and it _is_ definitely a problem to get a > 32-bit > binary into the 64-bit release of a Liunx distro. > > Truth be told, I would have thought that it would be a given that there > would be > a 64-bit version of dmd when going to support 64-bit compilation and was > quite > surprised when that was not your intention. > I'd be more interested in a build of DMD that just doesn't eat memory like popcorn.
