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32-bit to 64-bit - Obsolesence Pains Again?

Posted by Cliff on from the will-history-repeat-itself dept.

robotsrule asks: "Having been in the computer industry a while I distinctly remember the pain of making the 16-bit to 32-bit transition, when Windows made the change to 32-bit support. Any developer who remember the joys of thunking and other kludges that were meant to help code conversions also remembers the arcane marathon debug sessions too. I have not been keeping up with the latest Microsoft Longhorn technical news, or the plans that the Linux community has for 64-bit platform support. Does anyone out there have a reliable prediction for the amount of system shock we are facing when either Longhorn or 64-bit Linux comes out? Will I lose all my favorite 32-bit development tools again as I watch the backward compatibility support dry up as the 64-bit O/S platforms are adopted? Or are the O/S manufacturers making happy noises about long-term support for existing development languages and tools?"

5 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. 64 bit linux :-)? by Crimsane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My latest gentoo install is 64 bit, built from the ground up. works great for the most part. there was no lilo that i saw, but I use grub anyways. other then that i'm not missing anything. I've known people that've ran 64 bit in different distros for a couple months now, and they're all quite happy with it.

    1. Re:64 bit linux :-)? by croddy · · Score: 5, Informative
      1. 32-bit Flash works just fine on 64-bit gentoo. Install 32-bit Mozilla or Netscape binaries, and install the Flash plugin there. No need to switch machines, just switch browsers.
      2. ATI Drivers: I'm afraid you're on your own here.
      3. Sun Java 5 runs just fine on 64-bit gentoo, even if it is missing a browser plugin. Install blackdown-jre and your applets should run just fine.
  2. 64-bit Linux by reynaert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    when [...] 64-bit Linux comes out

    64 bit Linux came out about a decade ago, when it was ported to the Alpha (and, unlike Windows NT for Alpha, it was a true 64 bit port).

  3. Re:64-bit linux by jnik · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Hmm... but this is different. The 16 to 32-bit PC transition didn't require you to go out and buy new hardware.

    Huh!? Sure it did. You couldn't run 32 bit code on a 286. In practice, by the time 32 bit became effectively mandatory (Win95), the sheer horsepower requirements pushed an upgrade more strongly than word size. It'll likely be the same this time around.

  4. Re:Oh yeah, what about Java? by cratermoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    > the int is still 32 bits

    Defined that way by the language standard and will always be that way on any platform past, present, and future. That's why it's platform-neutral, because you don't have to deal with ridiculous low-level issues like the size of standard datatypes. All primitive types are fixed by the language standard. These sizes do not change from one machine architecture to another (as do in most other languages). This is one of the key features of the language that makes Java so portable.

    Need more than 2,147,483,647? Try long -- 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Still not big enough? java.math.BigInteger is arbitrary precision.

    Although programming in Java has lost some of its charm for me, I never ever again want to have to program in a language where I don't know from one platform to the next whether or not a particular bit of arithmetic will overflow.