Is DMD 2.052 32-bit?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday 10 March 2011 01:57:37 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/9/2011 7:08 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Truth be told, I would have thought that it would be a given that there
> > would be a 64-bit version of dmd when going to support 64-bit
> > compilation and was quite surprised when that was not your intention.
> 
> Adding another set of binaries doubles the testing time and download times
> for users.

The testing time, I understand. The download times seems pretty inconsequential 
to me and not a big deal at all (and as Gour points out, you could have separate 
zip files for separate architectures). However, it's a given that people are 
going to want a full 64-bit binary and to some extent will expect it. It's not 
at all normal to produce 64-bit binaries from a 32-bit compiler. Obviously such 
cross-compiling _can_ be done and sometimes is, but it's not at all the norm, 
and the more naive folks probably don't even think that you can do that, so 
having a 32-bit binary produce 64-bit code will confuse the less experienced.

Linux distros _definitely_ prefer to have native binaries, and those that try and 
be 64-bit pure _can't_ use 32-bit binaries unless those binaries are completely 
statically linked - though multilib is still the most common scenario for 64-bit 
versions of most Linux distros. Still, they lean heavily towards 64-bit and 
generally try to use absolutely as little 32-bit as possible.

So, having a 32-bit binary produce 64-bit binaries works, and it's better than 
having no 64-bit support, but in the long run, it really is preferable to have a 
64-bit binary for dmd. I understand if that's not exactly a high priority at the 
moment (and I agree that there are more important issues), but I would still 
expect that we'd get a 64-bit dmd binary eventually.

- Jonathan M Davis