64-bit DMD for windows?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-12-16 10:10, torhu wrote:
> On 16.12.2011 00:35, Mehrdad wrote:
>> On 12/15/2011 3:20 PM, Trass3r wrote:
>>>> dealbreaker - i'd love to use D for my scientific programming, but my
>>>> datasets often reach several GB...
>>>>
>>>> my computer has 16GB and i intend to make use of them.
>>>
>>> Scientific programming on Windoze? You can't be serious :P
>>
>> lol, that's not even the only issue.
>>
>> 32-bit programs can't show 64-bit dialogs. So "Open this file..."
>> actually shows the SysWOW64 folder instead of the System32 folder, and
>> there's _no way_ to bypass this unless you build a 64-bit app.
>
> Most people are not actually doing scientific programming. And they
> don't actually need to open an open file dialog to access files that are
> in the "real" System32. But if they do, there are several easy
> solutions.[1] Another reason for needing a 64-bit program on Windows
> would be if you are creating a shell extension. TortoiseSVN comes in
> both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors for this reason.
>
> People coming from Linux are accustomed to a running only 64-bit
> programs if they have a 64-bit OS. That's simply because Linux is
> usually distributed through downloading. To limit the download size,
> they leave out the 32-bit versions of libraries. Which means you can't
> actually run 32-bit programs without downloading and installing the
> packages containing those libraries first. At least that's my
> understanding.
>
> This issue doesn't exist on Windows. Probably not on OS X either, but
> I'm not too familiar with that system.

Mac OS X has universal binaries, that is, libraries and executables 
containing code for multiple architectures. All system libraries bundled 
with the OS are compiled (at least) both for 32 and 64bit. This makes it 
no problem running either 32 or 64bit applications, the user don't have 
to know or care.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg