On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:49:09 -0500
"B. Stia"
Hello SuSE people.
Question: Am running an AMD 64 processor. There are still not all programs that are 64 bit. I know that the system will handle 32 bit stuff but I was wondering if an src file can be compiled to 64 bit. By default, if you are running on a 64-bit system with a 64-bit OS the compiler default should be 64-bits. The file command should tell you if a binary is 32-bit or 64-bit. One of the problems that developers have is that most 32-bit apps work fine on 64-bit systems, so there is not much incentive to provide both a 32-bit and 64-bit version. And, there is no guarantee that the 64-bit version will be faster.
BTW: I've been working 64-bits since about 1994 on the Alpha. One
problem we had with the Alpha was that we had fx32 which allowed us to
run 32-bit Windows apps on the 64-bit Alpha running NT. The idea was to
ease the transition, but it also provided no incentive for developers
to create native 64-bit Alpha code. I think that the transition to
64-bits in Linux space will be a bit slow, but as Intel and AMD stop
making the 32-bit chips, there will be some steady progress.
--
Jerry Feldman