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by arsenide 2447 days ago
Per a StackOverflow post, the reasons for this are detailed here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu...

Is there some reason you would expect a 64-bit Visual Studio port before a Linux port?

1 comments

The blog post is 10 years old, the reasoning was poor then and has not aged well. No mention of the performance benefits of extra registers, new instructions, security benefits, etc.

The only advantage I can see to staying 32-bit is that Windows on ARM64 only has an x86 emulator, not x86_64.

I think there’s a 0% chance of a Linux port: VS Code is the cross-platform/future dev environment for Microsoft. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a 64-bit Visual Studio is coming soon to Windows.

The new instructions are generally special-purpose, Visual Studio doesn't sound like an obvious target for vectorisation. Security is meaningless - VS is not on a security boundary. The memory size cost disadvantage is real, though.