64-bit DMD for windows?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 16, 2011 10:10:57 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.

On Linux, there's frequently no point in having 32-bit libraries installed. 
Everything is built for the native architecture, so why bother having the 32-
bit libraries if they're not needed? There are the occasional exception - such 
as if you want to run wine in 32-bit mode, but even that can be in 64-bit now 
(though the risk of it not being appropriately compatible with Windows 
programs is greater in 64-bit, since it's newer).

I would fully expect Windows to run 32-bit programs, but I would also think 
that 64-bit programs would become the norm such that there would eventually be 
no reason to have 32-bit programs aside from legacy stuff which isn't rebuilt. 
And considering that there are no x86 chips sold these days which aren't 
x86_64, I find it rather baffling that Microsoft even sells a 32-bit version of 
Windows. As long as the 64-bit versions runs the 32-bit programs properly, I 
don't see any point in having a 32-bit version of the OS - especially 
computers increasingly have too much memory to be able to use it all with a 
32-bit OS.

- Jonathan M Davis