[eco]

They've actually talked about why they haven't done this here[1]:

"So why not just move Visual Studio to be a 64-bit application? While we’ve seriously considered this porting effort, at this time we don’t believe the returns merit the investment and resultant complexity. We’d still need to ship a 32-bit version of the product for various use cases, so adding a 64-bit version of the product would double the size of our test matrix. In addition, there is an ecosystem of thousands of extensions for Visual Studio (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com) which would need to also port to 64-bit. Lastly, moving to 64-bit isn’t a panacea – as others have noted (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2016/01/11/a-little-6...), unless the work doesn’t fit into a 32-bit address space, moving to 64-bit can actually degrade performance."

Also, a lot of people don't realize that there is a 64-bit version of the toolsets[2] (for C++ at least). I don't tend to have high memory use by Visual Studio itself but often run out of heap space using the compiler and linker so having access to those can be very helpful.

1. https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... 2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/how-to-enable-a-6...

[maccard]

I always scoff when I read this. “ I don’t run out of memory that means nobody else does”

My team regularly (on a daily basis) runs into high memory usage VS issues, which inevitably end up with VS hanging and being force killed and restarted. I d gotten to the point that I restart VS in the morning and at lunch every day to work around the issue.

[mrpippy]

It's funny, Microsoft Office has the same problems to an even greater degree (vastly more users, more 3rd party extensions, an entire suite of apps each probably more complex than VS), and yet they've had a 64-bit edition available since 2013

[vic20forever]

They've always recommended the 32-bit version to users who require compatibility with those 3rd party extensions:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681792.aspx

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-between-the-...

[danielbarla]

I suspect that being one of Microsoft's primary cash cows, they'd also have vastly more developers to throw at the problem.

[saagarjha]

Took them long enough, too. For the longest time they couldn’t switch because they were using Carbon instead of Cocoa.

[malkia]

The linker (especially when doing LTCG) can run out of space, even if it's the 64-bit one. There was some 2GB limit (or was it 4GB), but don't remember. Happened some time ago (years?) when tried LTCG on the WebRender (chrome/bink?) that Qt bundles.