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Issue: 15.6 (November/December 2017)
Author: Paul Lefebvre
Author Bio: Paul Lefebvre is the Xojo Developer Evangelist. He has been using Xojo and prior versions since 2001.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,881
Starting Page Number: 87
Article Number: 15610
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Excerpt of article text...
Geoff recently announced on the Xojo blog that the 64-bit Xojo IDE has recently entered beta testing. This is a big milestone in Xojo's 64-bit support, which first appeared in late 2015.
There are some nice advantages to having a 64-bit IDE, but before I talk about that, I thought it might be a good idea to explain why 64-bit is important in general.
64-bit Primer
First, what does 64-bit actually bring to the table? Essentially, when you hear of 64-bit, it refers to something pretty technical: how data is addressed by the operating system and/or CPU.
So I'm going to go back in time a bit. In the early 1990s, the popular Windows 3 was a 16-bit operating system. A 16-bit system might imply that only 64K of memory could be used (2^16 ), but most 16-bit systems used a few more bits to allow for higher memory with some even having extensions to allow up to 4GB of memory, at least by the OS. Individual apps were more limited, however.
When Windows 95 came out as a 32-bit OS, it could still run 16-bit apps, but for better performance and memory management, 32-bit apps were preferred. 32-bit apps can access much more memory (usually a bit over 3GB, but that depends on the OS).
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