[Rd] 64 Bit

[Peter Dalgaard]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On 22 Oct 2004, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> 
> > Re. Windows, the issue is that we're using the mingw32 toolkit. If
> > there is ever a mingw64, I'm sure we'd attempt a port almost
> > immediately. 
> 
> Not that clear.  Under Win64, long is still 32bits so quite a bit of work
> will required to take advantage of a 64-bit space (starting with surgery
> on the memory manager).  So we would need
> 
> 	Win64 (not released yet)
> 	mingw64 (not promised, AFAIK)
> 	Suitable hardware
> 	A volunteer with all of the above and 
> 	suitable C programming skills.
> 
> I was quite serious about `no plans': last time this was raised neither 
> Duncan Murdoch nor I had any such plans.

No real disagreement here. I was just underlining the fact that we
need some pretty crucial infrastructure in order to even comtemplate a
port. So if people want R for Win64, the first thing to do is to lobby
for someone to create the tools. 

Re. mingw64, the exact quote from the mingw FAQ is: "The project's
name changed from mingw32 to MinGW is to prevent the implication that
MinGW will only works on 32 bit systems (as 64 and higher bit machines
become more common, MinGW will evolve to work with them)", which I'd
say is sort of a promise. No code has ever materialised, though. 

My gut feeling is still that *if* the tools (and the OS) were there,
we'd consider a port, but tea leaves can be read in multiple ways...

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907