Quote:
Originally Posted by bartman
But for frells sake, whats the point of buying a 64 bit os. We are in an age where you can cheaply buy 8/16 Gb of memory but cant use it in 32 bit os.
What I'm tying to say is that computers and their associated hardware components are way ahead of software - open source, commercial, pubic etc.
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If you have the right AMD/Intel hardware and O/S you can make use of 16GB with a 32 bit O/S. Each application will still only get access to 4GB, out of which comes the memory used by hardware like the video card.
Converting a 32bit app to 64bit requires the source code. All the pointer variables have to changed from 32bits to 64bits and you can't do that without the source. If the programmer has done something weird that expects pointers and "long integers" to be the same size and have no alignment restrictions you very quickly come to grief. Anyone who has tried porting apps written for Intel hardware to SPARC or Power hardware knows all about that.
Try these possibilities:
"long int" and pointer both 32 bits. (classic 32 bit design).
"long int" 64 bits and pointer 32 bits. (32 bit AIX or Solaris design).
"long int" 32 bits and pointer 64 bits. (one version of 64 bit design).
"long int" and pointer both 64 bits. (64 bit AIX or Solaris 64 bit design).
64 bit Windows uses one of the "long int" formats and the 64 bit pointers. I can't remember which.
Then all the libraries you depend on also have to be 64 bit.