Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kevingadd 4950 days ago
64b on windows is a fuck-up? I haven't had a problem with 64/32-bit compatibility since windows 7 came out, other than devices that only have 32-bit drivers. And you'll have that problem anywhere - even Apple's marvel of engineering where you double the size of executables won't solve that.

Software shipping as 32-bit isn't a bad thing. It means it will run on more machines. Shipping a Windows application as 32-bit has NO negative consequences unless your application needs more than 2GB of available address space, with a couple rare exceptions like shipping device drivers or debugging tools.
1 comments
Tloewald 4950 days ago
Apple's "marvel of engineering" actually does. You can launch an app in 32-bit mode (while running in 64-bit mode) should you require interoperability with 32-bit components. All actually pretty neat. And given that most of an app isn't executable binaries (and hasnt been since forever) the size of executables isn't a big deal.

(A few years ago I had to run Safari in 32-bit mode to test unity web apps for the brief period where unity didn't offer a 64-bit plugin.)

link
kevingadd 4949 days ago
You're saying that you can load a 32-bit device driver into a 64-bit OS X kernel? I think you're wrong.
link
Tloewald 4949 days ago
You're right, although you can run 64-bit apps on the 32-bit kernel with 32-bit drivers.
link