Hot for dmd 64bit

Brad Roberts braddr at puremagic.com
Wed Jan 26 23:43:30 PST 2011


On 1/26/2011 10:32 PM, dwilson wrote:
> Beside praying and pestering, what can we D non-experts do to help get a stable 64-bit dmd available?
> 
> Killer D features are strings, slick built in dynamics arrays, no headers files to keep in sync, and the
> other nice features often praised by others.   I'm not sure yet that D is my favorite language, but it's in
> the list of top three.
> 
> Killing D (at least for me) is the limit choices for compiling on 64-bit Linux with D2 and preferably Phobos
> instead of Tango.  My setup, for reasons I haven't investigated deeply, can't run 32-bit anything, and I do
> intend to work on huge arrays of data, a few GB in RAM.  As for Phobos, it's obviously more Mars-related
> than "Tango" :)
> 

We're getting awfully near to a d2 dmd that passes all of it's current tests (d1 achieved that state about 2 weeks ago).
 As a rough guess, I'd say another few weeks and we'll reach that milestone.  There are 8 failing tests in the public
version of the dmd d2 test suite (not sure about the non-public suite, probably some undiagnosed issues in there too) +
18 failures in the phobos test suite.  Bugs have been fixed at a rate of about 1 per day.  So.. you can do the math.

Once that's done, it'll be time to cast a wider net.. ie, a seriously alpha quality release.  Chances are super high
that lots of problem will be encountered and lots of bug reports will roll in.  They'll be fixed.  More releases will
occur.  More will be fixed.. and at some point, it'll be usable enough.  The hard part will be getting good bug reports,
very small reproducible test cases.

I won't hazard a guess at how long it'll take before dmd 64 bit support is as stable as the 32 bit support, other than
'longer than everyone would probably like'.

Hope that helps,
Brad


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list