dmd 2.029 release

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> This is a major revision to Phobos, including Andrei's revolutionary new 
> range support.
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html
> http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.2.029.zip

This is looking very nice! I want to switch from D1 to D2, but...

I don't want to sound greedy or anything, and I know others have asked 
for this before, but is making a 64-bit Linux version of DMD a lot of work?

I admit I don't know much about these things, and what I'm going to say 
next may not make sense at all, but here goes:

x86-64 is just a superset of x86, right? Wouldn't it be possible, as a 
first step in the direction of a full-fledged x86-64 compiler, to simply 
make one that uses the same instruction set as the current DMD, but, I 
dunno, marks the executable as 64-bit (or something like that)? 
Specialisation and optimisation for the 64-bit architecture could then 
come at a later point in time.

I know it is possible to run the 32-bit compiler (and the executables it 
produces) on a 64-bit operating system, but it isn't possible to link 
against 64-bit libraries. This means that one has to install and 
maintain 32-bit versions of all the libraries one wants to use, and 
those are, in general, not available through the repositories of most 
64-bit distros.

-Lars