We might be getting Windows64 version of Free42

[Thomas Okken]

(06-18-2017 07:52 PM)Luigi Vampa Wrote:  My 2014's laptop is 32W7. I guess ca. 30% of regular PCs are 32 bits today, according to some sources.

I would rather ask for 32 AND 64 bits, but that certainly means some more work to Thomas, so that it is up to him.

I'll admit that I was surprised when zeno3333 asked about a 64-bit build. So far, the only 64-bit builds that I publish are the ones for iOS and Linux, and that's because on those platforms they are needed: on iOS because of Apple policy, and on Linux because many 64-bit distros don't come with 32-bit support any more.

64-bit seemed unnecessary, because, to paraphrase Rolls-Royce, Free42 is "fast enough."
Then again, if you don't limit yourself to legacy HP-42S programs, but start throwing difficult integrals and large matrices at it, it could become slow. O(n^3) algorithms can do that.

I haven't tried building the 64-bit version yet, because I'll have to get the 64-bit Windows SDK first, and figure out what needs to be tweaked in order to create 64- and 32-bit versions of the Intel lib and the app from the same sources. Once that's done, I'll run some tests, and if there is a significant speed increase, I'll start publishing it on my web site.

N.B. That doesn't mean the 32-bit version is going away. Even though almost all PCs sold over the last decade or more have 64-bit CPUs, there are still a lot of 32-bit CPUs out in the wild, and also a lot of people running 32-bit Windows on 64-bit hardware.

Regarding the question "will it make much of a difference," I think yes, probably. Not for the binary version, but the decimal version uses 64-bit integers heavily (in the Intel library), so that could well speed up significantly... And if it does, maybe I'll also start building the Mac and Android versions as 32/64-bit fat binaries, because why not. :-)