64-bit

Daniel de Kok me at nowhere.nospam
Mon Oct 19 01:14:57 PDT 2009


On 2009-10-17 22:11:56 +0200, "Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> said:
> Only on 64-bit systems. Which are already ridiculously fast anyway. So what
> if they get some more performance? They already have gobs of performance to
> spare. On a 32-bit system it changes the programs performance down to "It
> don't f** work at all", which is the mark of an incredibly arrogant
> developer who likes to shoot themself in the foot by arbitrarily shrinking
> their own potential user base.

Well, for some it is a necessity. In our field (NLP), a theoretical 
maximum of 4GB of memory is just too little for anything but some 
scripting. Just to give some numbers: with the current size of corpora 
we need ~20GB of memory for error mining in parsing results, and at 
least ~10GB of memory for serious natural language generation.

Until there is a good D2 compiler that can compile x86_64 on Linux, 
I'll have to continue using C++. After writing some small programs, I 
have come to the conclusion that the use of D would be far more 
comfortable, although some of the C++0x extensions that are already 
implemented in g++ help.

Not that I am complaining, I understand that the first priority is 
getting the D2 specification finished, but I think it would be far more 
productive (and easier to support x86_64) if LLVM became the default 
backend. LLVM will be the future of non-managed compiled languages 
anyway...

Take care,
Daniel




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