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64-Bit Computing: A silent revolution? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was recently reading Tracy Kidder's excellent book Soul of a New Machine.

The author pointed out what a big deal the transition to 32-Bit computing was.

However, in the last 20 years, I don't really remember a big fuss being made of most computers going to 64-bit as a de facto standard. Why is this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

With 16bit, programmers had to deal with far pointers, near pointers, segmentation. That was a lot harder than the flat linear 32 bit pointers. Also, the switch to 32bit was largely simultaneous with a switch to protected mode virtual memory, another huge quality of life improvement. The switch from 32 bit to 64 bit on x86 didn’t change anything about how programmers had to write their code.