dmd 2.029 release

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu, el 21 de abril a las 07:38 me escribiste:
>> 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 would kill for a 64-bit Linux DMD. I think it could take a lot of ways of 
>> coding to a whole new level. Sean and I have also been discussing how to 
>> integrate memory-mapped files with the garbage collector. In a 64-bit 
>> environment this makes for an awesome programming model.
> 
> Can you elaborate on that?

Not much time, but in short: Memory-mapped files are not a pure library 
thing, they are core because they manipulate the address space. So they 
are quite like memory allocation. Unmapping files by hand is as unsafe 
as calling delete. So memory mapped files must be integrated with the 
collector: you map a file by hand, and the garbage collector closes it 
when there are no more references to the memory mapped for the file.

The programming model is pretty cool - in 32 bit I always need to mind 
the address space because it's so densely populated. In 64 bits I can 
map all of my data files in memory and let the paging system and the 
garbage collector take care of the rest.


Andrei