dmd platform support - poll

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Ah ha, there's that usual "if you go and buy a PC" catch. Which begs the 
> question, why would I? My existing system does everything I need it to do 
> perfectly fine. And since I'm not petty enough to allow anyone to shame me 
> into buying a new system just by calling my *current* system "legacy", that 
> leaves no real reason for me to buy a new one.

I agree that often there is little incentive to upgrade. In particular 
incentive can be negative when it comes to Vista vs. XP.

[snip]
>> so supporting 64bit is just supporting the current technology. it's not 
>> about fancy servers or anything like that, just supporting the current 
>> standards. that's a minimun that should be expected from any compiler 
>> implementation nowadays.
>> b) even though for now there is a compatability mode in most OSes, why 
>> would I want to limit the performance and abilities of my PC to old 
>> technology which is being faded away?
>>
> 
> Even in 32-bit "legacy" mode, 64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway.

Talk about adding insult to injury. This is a rather random statement to 
make. Really, browsing the Web, writing documents, or writing emails is 
all you want from a computer? I'd say, until computers are not at least 
potentially capable of doing most intellectual tasks that people do, 
we're not in the position to say that computers are fast enough. When 
seen from that perspective, computers are absurdly slow and scarce in 
resources. The human brain's capacity bypasses our largest systems by a 
few orders of magnitude, and if we want to claim doing anything close, 
we should at least have that capacity. But even way, way before that, 
any NLP or speech recognition system that does anything interesting 
needs days, weeks, or months to train on computer clusters, when it all 
should run in real time. Please understand that from that perspective 
the claim that computers are plenty fast and memory is plenty large is 
rather shortsighted.


Andrei