Two Questions

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, February 09, 2014 18:16:08 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?

Cross compilation? If you're building on Linux, and you're developing 
software, you're either just distributing source (and thus not building it for 
_anyone_), or you're building it for several distros, which means worrying 
about deb and rpm and all that nonsense. Cross-compilation is trivial in 
comparison. Or do you mean having to cross compile for Windows? If you need to 
build something for Windows, then you build something for Windows - probably 
on a Windows machine. But why should I suffer through using Windows as my 
normal machine just because the majority of users do?

But really, most of the time, I don't care what other people might be using. I 
use my desktop for everything, not just development, so what target I might be 
creating software some portion of my time is pretty irrelevant. If I needed to 
be creating Windows software and couldn't develop it cross-platform enough to 
do it on Linux, I'd just switch to a Windows box to do that work and live in 
Linux the rest of the time. Fortunately, for work, what I do is cross-platform 
enough, and several of our products are on Linux, such that most of the time 
I'm in Linux, but I do sometimes have to use a Windows box to develop software 
at work. At home though, I rarely have any reason to touch Windows.

As for 64-bit, I couldn't possibly live in 32-bit land at this point. I always 
have dozens of Windows open across several virtual desktops on my home machine 
such that even if all of the programs had relatively small memory footprints, 
I'd eat through memory. At this particular moment, I'm using about 21.6 out of 
64GB of memory on my machine, and most of the running applications use less 
than 100MB of memory - only 9 are using more than 200MB. Memory usage adds up 
_fast_ when have a lot of applications open, even without any memory hogs. But 
I'd also prefer to be able run programs that are memory hogs when I need to, 
so it's nice to have a lot of overhead (and with memory being as cheap as it 
is, I don't see much reason not to put as much memory in the box as it can 
hold). And actually, with 64GB, for the first time in years, I don't have 
memory problems (my last computer had only 16GB), and it's great. I rarely use 
anywhere near 32GB, so 32 would probably be enough, but I'd much rather have 
64 and not worry about it at all.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone would bother with 32-bit these days except 
maybe for mobile, where a lot of ARM chips are 32-bit. x86 chips have all been 
64-bit for years now. If you're using 32-bit, you're just restricting yourself 
on how much memory you can use to little benefit as far as I can see. Even if 
all of the applications that you're running or building are 32-bit, you're 
still better off having the OS be in 64-bit. And you get more memory out of 
the deal even if you have as little as 4GB in the box. I wish that everything 
would move to 64-bit so that we wouldn't have to even worry about 32-bit 
anymore.

- Jonathan M Davis