• dsimcha (4/4) May 06 2011 Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for
• Brad Roberts (8/11) May 06 2011 For freebsd, almost nothing since it's all elf and uses the gnu tool cha...
• Jacob Carlborg (7/18) May 08 2011 Mac OS X has the advantage of universal binaries, almost every library
• Walter Bright (5/9) May 06 2011 I don't think there are any technical problems, just a lot of detail wor...

dsimcha <dsimcha yahoo.com> writes:

Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for 
it), what are the main roadblocks to DMD supporting 64-bit on Mac OS and 
FreeBSD?  I understand that on Windows we'd need a new linker, etc, but 
IIUC FreeBSD and Mac OS use GCC like Linux does.

Brad Roberts <braddr puremagic.com> writes:

On 5/6/2011 9:58 PM, dsimcha wrote:
 Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for it),
what are the main roadblocks to DMD
 supporting 64-bit on Mac OS and FreeBSD?  I understand that on Windows we'd
need a new linker, etc, but IIUC FreeBSD and
 Mac OS use GCC like Linux does.

For freebsd, almost nothing since it's all elf and uses the gnu tool chain
largely as is.  I've already done a first
pass test of it and the results were extremely promising.  Maybe the next
release can have it.

For OSX, it's more work since it's not elf based and they diverge fairly far
from a pure gnu tool chain.  At a minimum,
the ability to write out macho 64 bit .o files.  Probably more, but hopefully
not a lot more.  It'll be a lot easier to
assess after that part is done I suspect.

Later,
Brad

Jacob Carlborg <doob me.com> writes:

On 2011-05-07 07:24, Brad Roberts wrote:
 On 5/6/2011 9:58 PM, dsimcha wrote:
 Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for it),
what are the main roadblocks to DMD
 supporting 64-bit on Mac OS and FreeBSD?  I understand that on Windows we'd
need a new linker, etc, but IIUC FreeBSD and
 Mac OS use GCC like Linux does.

 For freebsd, almost nothing since it's all elf and uses the gnu tool chain
largely as is.  I've already done a first
 pass test of it and the results were extremely promising.  Maybe the next
release can have it.

 For OSX, it's more work since it's not elf based and they diverge fairly far
from a pure gnu tool chain.  At a minimum,
 the ability to write out macho 64 bit .o files.  Probably more, but hopefully
not a lot more.  It'll be a lot easier to
 assess after that part is done I suspect.

 Later,
 Brad

Mac OS X has the advantage of universal binaries, almost every library 
and application (at least the system libraries) are available both for 
32 and 64bit in the same binary and you usually don't have to think 
about 32 vs 64bit libraries.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

On 5/6/2011 9:58 PM, dsimcha wrote:
 Purely out of curiosity (as in I personally have no pressing need for it), what
 are the main roadblocks to DMD supporting 64-bit on Mac OS and FreeBSD? I
 understand that on Windows we'd need a new linker, etc, but IIUC FreeBSD and
Mac
 OS use GCC like Linux does.

I don't think there are any technical problems, just a lot of detail work.

Mac OS64 will be harder because there's that Mach-O format for object files
that 
is unique to the Mac.

FreeBSD64 uses ELF-64 which has already been done for Linux64.