On Friday, December 16, 2011 10:10:57 torhu wrote: > On 16.12.2011 00:35, Mehrdad wrote: > > On 12/15/2011 3:20 PM, Trass3r wrote: > >>> dealbreaker - i'd love to use D for my scientific programming, but > >>> my > >>> datasets often reach several GB... > >>> > >>> my computer has 16GB and i intend to make use of them. > >> > >> Scientific programming on Windoze? You can't be serious :P > > > > lol, that's not even the only issue. > > > > 32-bit programs can't show 64-bit dialogs. So "Open this file..." > > actually shows the SysWOW64 folder instead of the System32 folder, and > > there's _no way_ to bypass this unless you build a 64-bit app. > > Most people are not actually doing scientific programming. And they > don't actually need to open an open file dialog to access files that are > in the "real" System32. But if they do, there are several easy > solutions.[1] Another reason for needing a 64-bit program on Windows > would be if you are creating a shell extension. TortoiseSVN comes in > both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors for this reason. > > People coming from Linux are accustomed to a running only 64-bit > programs if they have a 64-bit OS. That's simply because Linux is > usually distributed through downloading. To limit the download size, > they leave out the 32-bit versions of libraries. Which means you can't > actually run 32-bit programs without downloading and installing the > packages containing those libraries first. At least that's my > understanding.
On Linux, there's frequently no point in having 32-bit libraries installed. Everything is built for the native architecture, so why bother having the 32- bit libraries if they're not needed? There are the occasional exception - such as if you want to run wine in 32-bit mode, but even that can be in 64-bit now (though the risk of it not being appropriately compatible with Windows programs is greater in 64-bit, since it's newer). I would fully expect Windows to run 32-bit programs, but I would also think that 64-bit programs would become the norm such that there would eventually be no reason to have 32-bit programs aside from legacy stuff which isn't rebuilt. And considering that there are no x86 chips sold these days which aren't x86_64, I find it rather baffling that Microsoft even sells a 32-bit version of Windows. As long as the 64-bit versions runs the 32-bit programs properly, I don't see any point in having a 32-bit version of the OS - especially computers increasingly have too much memory to be able to use it all with a 32-bit OS. - Jonathan M Davis