Hi Joel,
Yes, many benefits. From the top of my head, the Objective-C runtime is better/faster (and ObjC exceptions are true C++ exceptions, which match perfectly with our model), we can store more fixnums and floats as immediate values, etc.
More importantly, MacRuby is always tested and developed on x86_64 by default, so there is always the possibility that there might be bugs in i386 that don't exist in x86_64.
I don't know for LLVM but I would assume it's also tested and developed similarly.
Laurent
On Jan 6, 2011, at 3:45 PM, Joel Reymont wrote: