dmd 2.029 release

[Frits van Bommel]

Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> This is a major revision to Phobos, including Andrei's revolutionary 
>> new range support.
>>
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html
>> http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.2.029.zip
> 
> This is looking very nice! I want to switch from D1 to D2, but...
> 
> I don't want to sound greedy or anything, and I know others have asked 
> for this before, but is making a 64-bit Linux version of DMD a lot of work?
> 
> I admit I don't know much about these things, and what I'm going to say 
> next may not make sense at all, but here goes:
> 
> x86-64 is just a superset of x86, right? Wouldn't it be possible, as a 
> first step in the direction of a full-fledged x86-64 compiler, to simply 
> make one that uses the same instruction set as the current DMD, but, I 
> dunno, marks the executable as 64-bit (or something like that)? 
> Specialisation and optimisation for the 64-bit architecture could then 
> come at a later point in time.

It's not quite that simple. It's not a full superset; some x86 instructions are 
not valid x86-64 instructions.
For example, I think 'inc' was removed to make place for prefixes that set some 
flags for the next instruction and allow it to use the extra registers r8-r15.