dmd platform support - poll

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Andrei,
> 
>> In my opinion, it's not application pressure that drives 64-bit
>> machine adoption, now or in the near future. It's RAM price,
>> availability, and usefulness. A 32-bit machine cannot gainfully have
>> more than 4GB of RAM, period.
> 
> IIRC 32 bit Intel chips can address more like 64GB of RAM (I can't find 
> the ref but I seem to recall about 4 extra address bits). It's just 
> virtual address spaces that are limited to 4GB (or 2-3GB after the OS 
> takes it's pound of flesh)
> As pointed out, only a few apps need anything near 2GB of RAM per process.

Even if only a few apps need anything near 2GB of RAM per process, their 
sum will exceed that limit rather quickly, which gives strong 
justification to 64-bit OSs. (Not sure if you meant to basically say the 
same.)

The real problem is that there are applications that need as much memory 
as they could possibly get, and for those dmd simply offers no option.


Andrei