64-bit support

[Jesse Phillips]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:11:58 +0900, Bill Baxter wrote:

> bearophile wrote:
>> Bill Baxter:
>>> eventually Walter himself may decide that switching to the LLVM
>>> back-end makes the most sense.
>> 
>> LLVM may allow D to do certain things that today are difficult, like
>> run-time creation of routines (they can be created by macros too), and
>> other dynamic things you can see in C#3.x, etc. With that you can
>> create something that even CommonLisp programmers may find attractive
>> ;-)
> 
> Not to mention that it should fix a raft of other long-standing bugs
> that have to do with OPTLINK.  I'm pretty convinced that LLVM is the way
> to go long term.  It would free Walter up from having to deal with back
> end issues, but still allow him to tinker with the back end or
> contribute patches to the LLVM team if he needs something to be fixed
> for D.  It would allow D to benefit from a world wide community working
> on porting to new back-end targets, and making improvements to the
> optimizer etc. Not to mention allowing D to piggyback on the corporate
> support from the likes of Apple that is going into LLVM right now.
> 
> I see basically no down sides to such a move, other than making the move
> would initially be a big time suck.  But I think the writing is on the
> wall that OPTLINK will have to be replaced eventually one way or
> another.  Going with LLVM looks to be the best way to do that in terms
> of cost/benefit ratios.
> 
> --bb

Maybe it could be something to push for, for D3.