64 bit version?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, September 22, 2011 19:38:25 mok-kong shen wrote:
> I just read that D fits nicely to the 64-bit architecture. Is there
> currently a D compiler that fully exploits the 64-bit hardware under
> Windows 7? I mean e.g. one can have operations in D on unsigned long int of
> 64 bits size that correspond directly to hardware operations so as to
> achieve high efficiency? (Sorry for my ignorant's question, I don't know
> yet the language.) Thanks in advance.

It's a toolchain issue. dmc, Digital Mars' C compiler, and optlink, its 
linker, are 32-bit only. On Linux, gcc is used as the linker, and gcc can be 
64-bit, so it was fairly straightforward to port dmd to 64-bit on Windows as 
far as the toolchain goes, but since on Windows, the entire rest of the 
toolchain is still 32-bit only, we can't have a 64-bit dmd yet. It'll happen 
eventually, but I believe that the main focus at this point is on bug fixing 
and that fixing the Windows toolchain to be 64-bit capable is a lower priority 
for right now.

- Jonathan M Davis