Two Questions

[John Colvin]

On Sunday, 9 February 2014 at 19:21:08 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Sunday, 9 February 2014 at 18:16:09 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 4 February 2014 at 16:18:24 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
>>> Popped into my head today.
>>>
>>> What proportion of the D community develops on Linux of some 
>>> sort, and what proportion works with a 64 bit OS?
>>>
>>> And why?
>>
>> OK, I'm clear about why Linux, but 64 bit I'm less clear 
>> about. What's the attraction about a system that's a memory 
>> hog, but not noticeably quicker, and where you have to do 
>> cross compilation to make applications that are usable by the 
>> vast proportion of world computer users?
>
> 64 bit is pretty ubiquitous in the 
> laptop/desktop/server/cluster world*. The extra registers is 
> occasionally important, as is the guarantee of SSE2.
>
> Memory is dirt cheap these days, so that really isn't a 
> problem. The larger address space is important for security 
> reasons, as well as the obvious ease of use of more RAM in a 
> single process.
>
> *and if you're straying out of that world then cross 
> compilation is standard anyway.

Just to clarify, of course I am talking from an x86-centric
viewpoint.