[tex-live] texlive for win64

[Norbert Preining]

On Mo, 16 Nov 2009, Jjgod Jiang wrote:
> By making it compiling faster you can do much more with less resource,

Joking? Current computers are so overpowered that compiling normal
documents is anyway a joke.

And those like Martin delivering products for a client and needs
to typeset thousands of page from XML can deliver their homemade
64bit binary anyway.

> like live preview, it can actually make your writing experience better.

I don't believe that a speed increase by some percent (10%? 15%?) will
actually be experienceable.

> Well, by "we" do you mean the TeX Live team or just tlmgr devs? I think

Which is more or less the same, or?

> it will still be helpful if TeX Live delivers part of the "core" binaries
> like pdftex, xetex and luatex in 64-bit, as Taco stated, it will make these
> programs significantly faster.

That is not possible. Adding another (broken-by-design) architecture
(and adding w64 means adding a new arch) is far from as easy as adding
another (not-broken-by-design) Unix arch (which boils down to drop
the binaries into the right place). There are tons of code to be
reviewed that we do not miss a place checking for W32 and forgetting
about W64.

> Anyway, you can't avoid this problem in other OSes either, for instance,
> I don't think we are providing 64-bit binaries on Mac OS X, which we
> really should.

Yes, but the point is that Windows is so f***ing hard to support, while
all the others are a blaze (well, cygwin is halfway between).

> BTW, what's the point of having a cygwin binary if you can use a native
> one?

Don't ask me ... I am not using cygwin. But I would prefer to have
a unix like environment on windows, too.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining                                        Associate Professor
JAIST Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology   preining at jaist.ac.jp
Vienna University of Technology                               preining at logic.at
Debian Developer (Debian TeX Task Force)                    preining at debian.org
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