Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Flaky 64-bit support for commercial applications?

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Sat, May 17, 2008 at 09:35 IST (last updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 22:19 IST)

I'm truly shocked that a quite a few commercial software, including games, still do not offer native 64-bit versions. 64-bit systems have been around for a few years now. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of x86-64 and AMD64 as opposed to the older x86 architecture as you simply cannot buy a new 32-bit processor or assemble 32-bit computers any more. While I can understand the need for backward compatibility, the norm should be 64-bit, not 32-bit support. Why is it so difficult for commercial vendors to provide two versions of their products: one compiled for 32-bit and the other with enhanced 64-bit support when a majority of Free Software/Open Source applications provide native support for both architectures?

I think that it's time for paying customers to demand native 64-bit support for software and not just flaky backward compatibility. It's not just a case of usability. 32-bit applications can still work with 64-bit processors. Indeed, 64-bit Windows Vista does provide an emulation layer for legacy Win32 executables, but most of these applications run considerably slower and, besides, are not exactly stable under the new environment. While it's fine for older applications, it's not acceptable when a product released in 2008 continues to target only x86 support.

I don't know the technicalities of 32 or 64-bit architectures, not being a system programmer. Probably the best way to judge it is by application performance in my own experience. And I've found that Windows applications that run in 32-bit mode simply do not use the full capabilities of the processor and tend to run perceptibly slower. This is especially the case with games where every bit of performance is absolutely critical for fast-paced animation. It's ludicrous that even commercial games don't take full advantage of new hardware capabilities when they should be the first to do so.

Having forced customers to upgrade to newer and better hardware over a period of time, it's ridiculous that software developers don't consider the market big enough to provide native support for that hardware. :mad:

5 comment(s)

  1. agreed... I have 64bit AMD processor but hardly using its potential

    Comment by Shrinidhi (visitor) on Sat, May 17, 2008 @ 21:08 IST #
  2. Forget 64-bit. I want my 8-bit stuff back. Now that was art, baby!

    Seriously though... money drives everything it seems and apparently there isn't enough money to be made in upgrading software to 64-bit yet. Don't be surprised when gaming consoles hit 128-bit and we're still stuck with 32-bit applications.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Sun, May 18, 2008 @ 06:05 IST #
  3. Shrinidhi, very true.

    RT, I don't mind if old applications aren't upgraded to 64-bit, but new software should definitely be 64-bit versions with a 32-bit compatibility version provided as a fallback. The point I was making is that even newer software seem to provide only 32-bit versions.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, May 18, 2008 @ 09:09 IST #
  4. How much truly new, from-scratch software is actually out there?

    Then again, a lot of programmers are just lazy (in the bad way) and don't bother learning how to program in a cross-platform or cross-CPU manner.

    Comment by tim (visitor) on Fri, May 30, 2008 @ 04:30 IST #
  5. Tim, very true. Writing truly cross-platform applications is a big challenge and is not always possible.

    But writing for different processor architectures is just usually a matter of compiling the code again targetting the different architectures.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Jun 2, 2008 @ 10:28 IST #

Comments closed

The blog owner has closed further commenting on this entry.