narrowed down the problem area

[Robert Fraser]

K.Wilson wrote:
> Bill Baxter Wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:26 PM, K.Wilson <phizzzt at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> I just finished initial support for x86-64 output with the ldc compiler (dmdfe attached to llvm backend) and wanted to do some timings, so I used the ray tracing code mentioned in this old thread. I compiled things with the same optimization flags mentioned in the thread and came up with these averages over 6 runs on an AMD x86-64 machine running Fedora Core Linux.
>>>
>>> llvm-g++4.0.1   5.76
>>> ldc-rev736      6.68
>>> g++4.1.2        6.72
>>> gdc0.24         7.45
>>> g++4.3.1        7.66
>>> dmd1.030        14.52
>>>
>>> Seems like the LLVM backend is doing well (though I have seen other timings where g++4.x beats llvm-g++4.x, so take from this what you will).
>>>
>>> I just thought I would let people know that ldc is coming along and performs quite well, at this point. And it has some x86-64 support now ;)
>> Faaaaan Tastic!
>>
>> So how is Windows support coming along?  Does it build smoothly with MinGW now?
>>
>> --bb
> 
> Hey Bill,
> 
> I didn't see your question the other day...the windows support is still not up to par for x86-64 (whether trying to build in 32 or 64 bit mode). I couldn't get things built on my machine for Windows (but I don't have VStudio 2008, which is suggested because MinGW64 is not production quallity yet).
> 
> I think building for MinGW on x86 is somewhat supported and running...exceptions and inline asm still have some issues...hopefully these issues will be resolved quickly.
> 
> Thanks,
> K.Wilson

I was trying to get LDC going on Windows x64, but it's been slow going 
with school & everything else. I submitted a path that gets it 
_compiling_ on VS (the patch is out-of-date, but it shouldn't be too 
hard to bring it up to date), but last time I checked (a couple weeks 
ago...) it would fail an assertion. It will take a lot of knowledge 
about LLVM internals to get LDC usable on this architecture+OS. Then 
there's Windows IA64...