On Thursday, December 21, 2006, 21:22:02, Stephane Bouvard (ML) wrote: > I do not say that Thebat will run faster, but i prefer using native 64 > bits apps when it's possible, in a few months/years 32 bits apps should > disapear, like old 16 bits apps. Otherwhile, why Thebat is compiled today > for 32 bits and not a 16 bits like old windows 3.0 app ? 16 bits apps are > still running with Windows XP, and TB should not be slower compiled in 16 > bits :)
That's where you're very wrong - 16bit applications can only access memory in 64kB segments (16bit pointer size limitation), which makes memory access slower, and programming more complicated. 32 and 64bit programs use linear memory model - meaning you can access all memory available to application directly [for 32bit applications this means direct access to at least 2GB memory, and for 64bit apps it's 8TB with current Windows versions], which makes programming much easier. There are also many other limitations when running in 16bit mode, which makes it impractical to use nowadays. 16bit->32bit is a much greater leap than 32bit->64bit. > The question is not "why", but "why not", 64 bits is the future. Exactly - it's the future, right now it's not widespread enough yet. There are still low-end CPUs sold that don't support long mode yet, and even though 64bit XP and Vista are available, they're currently spread even less than Linux. And given the number of 32bit programs available today, you can be certain that support for running them will be around for a long long time (it's been 11 years since Windows 95 came out, and only now the support for running 16bit programs has been dropped - and only on 64bit versions of the OS). -- < Jernej Simonèiè ><><><><>< http://deepthought.ena.si/ > Last guys don't finish nice. -- Kelley's Law ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.85.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
