64 Support on Mac, FreeBSD

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-05-07 07:24, Brad Roberts wrote:
> On 5/6/2011 9:58 PM, dsimcha wrote:
>> Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for it), what are the main roadblocks to DMD
>> supporting 64-bit on Mac OS and FreeBSD?  I understand that on Windows we'd need a new linker, etc, but IIUC FreeBSD and
>> Mac OS use GCC like Linux does.
>
> For freebsd, almost nothing since it's all elf and uses the gnu tool chain largely as is.  I've already done a first
> pass test of it and the results were extremely promising.  Maybe the next release can have it.
>
> For OSX, it's more work since it's not elf based and they diverge fairly far from a pure gnu tool chain.  At a minimum,
> the ability to write out macho 64 bit .o files.  Probably more, but hopefully not a lot more.  It'll be a lot easier to
> assess after that part is done I suspect.
>
> Later,
> Brad

Mac OS X has the advantage of universal binaries, almost every library 
and application (at least the system libraries) are available both for 
32 and 64bit in the same binary and you usually don't have to think 
about 32 vs 64bit libraries.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg