[Haskell-cafe] Building Haskell Platform natively for 64bit Windows

[Andrew Coppin]

On 06/06/2011 09:34 PM, Nicu Ionita wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Just to double check: that means, today it's not possible to generate 64
> bit operations under Windows, including bit level .&., .|. a.s.o. (from
> Data.Bits), and this situation will stay like this for a while.
>
> I'm asking this because I'm currently writing a pure Haskell chess
> engine based on bitboards. The bitboards are 64 bit wide and the basic
> operations are critical for speed, which is always critical in chess
> engines.
>
> Then it looks I'll have to implement these operations in C and use FFI
> to link them.

No, 64-bit integer operations will /work/ just fine, regardless of what 
platform you're on. Whether it will take advantage of 64-bit operations 
at the machine-code level is another matter entirely.

I'm not especially sure, but I think even in 32-bit mode, the x86 line 
of processors supports performing 64-bit operations via MMX, SSE or 
similar. Whether GHC is using that, I couldn't tell you.

I suppose the ultimate answer is: Benchmark it, and see how fast it is.