XSim hangs on power operations with large exponents

The following module should return 6'b110011, but instead it just hangs xsim 2013.4:

module issue_021(y);
  output [5:0] y;
  assign y = 6'd3 ** 123456789;
  initial #10 $display("%b", y);
endmodule

XSim 2013.4 seems to try to evaluate this expression by performing 123456789 multiplications instead of using a proper power-modulus algorithm.

In my tests I have run this module with:

xvlog issue_021.v
xelab -R work.issue_021

Crosscheck: Modelsim 10.1d can simulate this module in an instant and Vivado 2013.4 can synthesize it correctly. Isim 14.7 and XST 14.7 seem to suffer from a similar problem.

History:
2014-01-25 Reported bug in Xilinx Support Forum
2014-04-16 Still broken in XSim 2014.1
2015-05-15 Still broken in XSim 2015.1
2017-07-01 Fixed in XSim 2017.2