Toby Ewing wrote:

There was a thread in early October about compilers on 64-bit machines that I'd like to return to.

If all goes well, I'll soon buy a 64-bit machine, so as to have access to more memory than I have now. And of course, I'd like to be able to use my existing programs on it, recompiled to take advantage of the 64-bit memory address space.

Will GPC be up and running on itanium/opteron chips in a few months? Or should I be looking elsewhere for a 64-bit Pascal compiler? Or (way different track) should I get a Macintosh G5, which I believe now has a working GPC binary?

Yes, there is a working GPC binary for Mac OS X (at http://www.microbizz.nl/gpc.html). It produces 32-bit code that can be optimized for several processors, including the G5. As of now, it is 32-bit, not 64-bit (neither is Mac OS 10.3). It doesn't cross the 4 GB boundary. I expect this to change when the gcc back-end for the apple-powerpc-darwin target evolves.

Of course, the Macintosh G5 is great hardware, you can run Mac OS X on it with support for Mac OS X "aqua", Mac OS X classic and X11. Most GNU/Linux software is being ported to Mac OS X, I believe GNOME and KDE are in beta state. Another option is to install a dual-boot for both Darwin/Mac OS X and PowerPC Linux (this should be possible, but I haven't tried it yet myself).

The choice is yours, as a long discussion on platforms falls outside the scope of this list.

Regards,

Adriaan van Os