dmd platform support - poll

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
> news:gj6mds$28iv$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> 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.
>>
> 
> I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus 
> suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. But yea, that 
> alone isn't enough to balance out the reasons against upgrading.
> 
>> [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.
>>
> 
> When a reasonably-priced computer comes around that can actually do those 
> sorts of things, I may very well be finally enticed to upgrade. But like you 
> said, as it stands right now, even the high-end stuff can't do it. So it's 
> really a non-issue for now. 

I don't understand. This is like a reply to another thread. This anyone 
would agree with. I agree that for your current computing work and 
perceived needs you don't feel about upgrading your hardware. I mean, 
what's really there to disagree. But that has nothing to do with the 
generalizations aired before a la "64-bit systems are absurdly fast 
anyway" or that there's no need for 64-bit. To write software that 
tackles hard problems one really needs the fastest hardware one's budget 
can buy. I can't understand what you say except in the frame that you 
indiscriminately assume that everybody else has your wants and needs 
from a computer (and consequently is a snob for getting a relatively 
fast one). Really that's a rather... unsophisticated world view to go 
by. I'm even amazed I need to spell this out.


Andrei