Wow. Who dedicated August as "Be Patronizing To Hime Month" and why did no one 
tell me?

I don't know what the minimum system requirements on Windows for Quackle are, 
but it wouldn't shock me if it's compiled as low-level as possible - Pentium? 
Pentium II? As such, I imagine it features zero processor optimizations. 
Consider that AMD64 spec processors almost universally include command sets up 
to SSE3, and with the various number crunching going on, I can imagine there is 
some performance increase, not to mention the increased register sizes may be 
useful.

Most people for some reason are in a rush to claim that there's no benefit to 
switching to 64-bit programs... I honestly think they're just avoiding doing 
the work. I'd love to see a simple benchmark done just by recompiling without 
any work on the source code. To me, it doesn't seem like a lot. But apparently 
in the free software world, you're not allowed to ask for things.

--
It only took 15 years for me to get a sig... to shamelessly promote my podcast. 
http://www.valuecube.com

Aug 14, 2010 11:17:48 PM, [email protected] wrote:

===========================================

             
It's impossible to make a generalization about the performance
characteristics of 32-bit vs. 64-bit programs.  It is not true,
for exampe, that 64-bit programs can be expected to be twice as
fast because there are twice as many bits.  I could explain why
this is, but the explanation is pretty technical.  But just trust
me, it doesn't work that way.  In fact, depending upon the nature
of how a given program works, it's actually possible for a 64-bit
version to be *slower* than a 32-bit version, all other things
being equal.

There is only one true generalization one can make about 64-bit
programs, and that is that they are capable of accessing far more
memory than 32-bit programs.  This can be very important for
certain high-performance computing applications that deal with
large amounts of data, but that does not describe Quackle.

So, there may or may not be a performance increase associated with
compiling Quackle under 64-bit Windows.  If there is, I suspect it's
comparatively small, but that's a guess.  Assuming that Win64 Qt
builds without much difficulty, it probably would be easy for me
to test, but I just don't have the time right now.  I'm absolutely
saturated.

As for the Linux issues, perhaps the easier route would be to install
32-bit compatibility libraries.  Ubuntu doesn't include them by
default, but you can install them, which will enable all manner of
32-bit Linux binaries to work without a problem.  I'm sorry...I
don't know off the top of my head exactly what the name of the
32-bit ccompatibility package is, but I know for certain that it
exists.

Sincerely,

John Fultz
[email protected]

> Is there a 64-bit Windows version? Is there a performance increase
> associated with moving to 64-bit?
>
>
>
> -- Sent from my Palm Pre
> On Aug 14, 2010 8:14 PM, caughran40 <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The debian package at http://quackle.poslfit.com/ won't install under
> Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. "Wrong version," it says. Is this just a question of
> recompiling?
>
>
>
> The windows package does install under Win7 64-bit, which runs in a
> virtual machine under Ubuntu, so I'm not totally deprived.
>
>
>
> Jim Caughran
>
> caughranjim at gmail com


        

Reply via email to