Build Win32 DMD as Large Address Aware.

[Abscissa]

This allows Win32 DMD to use more than 2GB on 64-bit Windows (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=889654), which has become necessary for building Phobos, as well as other larger projects.

This requires the latest master of OPTLINK (this commit or newer). For convenience, I've posted a pre-built OPTLINK and a wiki page for manually building OPTLINK.

[ghost]

Sweet deal! Hopefully this gives us some breathing space.

[braddr]

not really.. win32 still has to work and won't benefit.. right?

[ghost]

Ah right..

[yebblies]

win32 should still benefit if you have more than 2GB of ram...

[Abscissa]

win32 should still benefit if you have more than 2GB of ram...

In certain cases, yea, it will allow DMD to use up to 3GB of virtual address space on a 32-bit Windows OS (not necessarily related to physical RAM - so, at least in theory, you may not need 2GB+ as long as you have enough pagefile and lots of time to wait for all the thrashing...unless there's some other limitation I don't know about). But, on 32-bit versions of at least XP and 2003, Windows needs to (somehow) be booted with some special /3GB switch before it will actually use an application's "Large Address Aware" flag. I assume the same is true for 32-bit vista and up, but I can't find clear info on that.

On 64-bit Windows though, this "Large Address Aware" flag alone is enough to give DMD access to as much as 4GB of virtual address space. No special boot parameters needed on any version of 64-bit Windows.

[yebblies]

Heh, I didn't know you needed edit boot.ini. So I guess this has no effect for most people running win32, but a positive one for win64. Sounds good.

[ghost]

Here's more info on /3GB:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff556232.aspx