Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 06:33:02 Dmitry Olshansky via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 31 October 2017 at 01:25:31 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> > A 32 bit program can do most the same stuff.
>
> Client applications probably do not care much. Servers and
> cluster software can use more RAM and take advantage of huge
> address space in many interesting ways.

Wait, people run Windows on servers? No one could be that crazy, could they?
;)

I think that Adam has a valid point that there _are_ plenty of applications
that can function just fine as 32-bit, and given how much easier it is to
build for 32-bit on Windows with D, if you don't need to interact with any
3rd party libraries built with MS' compiler, then simply using the default
32-bit dmd stuff on Windows could be just fine.

But the fact remains that plenty of applications need 64-bit or would
benefit from 64-bit, and plenty of applications need access to COFF
libraries, and in those cases, you can't do things the easy way on Windows.

So, for some stuff, having dmd as it is now with 32-bit works just fine, but
for other stuff, it doesn't cut it at all. It really depends on what you're
trying to do. Either way, it's unfortunate that we have to jump through as
many hoops as we do in order to interact with the default C/C++ stuff on
Windows. Hopefully, we'll be able to improve that over time though - and we
already have. Once upon a time, we didn't have an installer on Windows (let
alone one that tried to help you with VS), and we couldn't build COFF stuff
with dmd at all.

- Jonathan M Davis