DMD and 64-bit

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1787.1298108224.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Saturday 19 February 2011 01:12:25 Russel Winder wrote:
> > Am I correct in assuming that DMD generates 32-bit by default and that
> > for 64-bit you have to give the -m64 option?
> >
> > Is the eventual plan to use the natural word length of the platform as
> > the default, i.e. 32-bit on 32-bit and 64-bit on 64-bit, with the option
> > to force something different using the -m option à la GCC?
>
> 32 bit is the default for now. I don't know what Walter intends to do in 
> the
> long run. If it were like gcc, then the default platform would be the 
> platform
> which the compiler is built for (which is exactly what it's doing right 
> now),
> but as far as I know, Walter has no plans to port dmd to x86_64.
>
> So, for now 32 bit is the default. It may or may not change later to be 
> the
> platform that you're building on. Ideally though, it would be like gcc and 
> we'd
> actually get a 64 bit version of dmd at some point.

I don't mean this as "anti-64bit" trolling, just a genuine question, but 
what would be the point of a 64-bit build of DMD? (Note: I'm talking about 
host, not target). Just to compile projects that have (on the order of) 
gigabytes of source?