On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 2:32 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: > On 26.01.2017 23:09, Random832 wrote: >> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017, at 11:21, Paul Moore wrote: >>> On a similar note, I always get caught out by the fact that the >>> Windows default download is the 32-bit version. Are we not yet at a >>> point where a sufficient majority of users have 64-bit machines, and >>> 32-bit should be seen as a "specialist" choice? >> >> I'm actually surprised it doesn't detect it, especially since it does >> detect Windows. >> >> (I bet fewer people have supported 32-bit windows versions than have >> Windows XP.) > > I think you have to differentiate a bit more between having a > 64-bit OS and running 64-bit applications. > > Many applications on Windows are still 32-bit applications and > unless you process large amounts of data, a 32-bit Python > system is well worth using. In some cases, it's even needed, > e.g. if you have to use an extension which links to a 32-bit > library.
It's also relatively common to need a 64-bit Python, e.g. if running programs that need more than 4 GiB of address space. (Data analysts run into this fairly often.) I don't know enough about Windows to have an informed opinion about how the trade-offs work out, but as an additional data point, it looks like in the last ~week of PyPI downloads, 32-bit windows wheels have been downloaded 379943 times, and 64-bit windows wheels have been downloaded 331933 times [1], so it's pretty evenly split 53% / 47%. -n [1] SELECT COUNT(*) AS downloads, REGEXP_EXTRACT(file.filename, r"(win32|win_amd64)\.whl") as windows_bitness, FROM TABLE_DATE_RANGE( [the-psf:pypi.downloads], TIMESTAMP("20170119"), TIMESTAMP("20170126") ) GROUP BY windows_bitness ORDER BY downloads DESC LIMIT 1000 -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/