Two Questions

[John Colvin]

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.