back to article Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version

Microsoft is to drag veteran code wrangler Visual Studio kicking and screaming into the modern world with a 64-bit version. It has been a while coming. Visual Studio dates back to the last century and started out life as Visual Studio 97 (replete with the likes of J++) before version 6.0 turned up to round out the 1990s. …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can we get it on an ISO please :)

    I don't like having to drag in 30+gigs just to make an offline cache of mostly cruft. Or at least just provide the compiler in the Windows 10 SDK so I don't need to faff about with Visual Studio.

    Yes I am requesting here because I have absolutely zero chance of Microsoft listening to any of their users requests regardless of where I post haha.

    Also, I swear I remember Microsoft making excuses for keeping with 32-bit because it makes better use of the cache. I would love to know what made that fact change ;)

    1. chuBb.

      Search visualstudio. Com for offline installer

    2. sgp

      Just post it on their UserVoice.. oh

    3. Malcolm 1

      Rico Mariani posted a couple of blogs on the advantages of keeping VS 32bit over the years. He has since left Microsoft, but has revisited the subject earlier this month (I wonder if he got a tip off?)

      https://ricomariani.medium.com/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet-849abcf0e5ec

  2. J27

    I predict this just results in Visual Studio using more memory with any real improvements.

  3. BJC
    Joke

    I guess I was wrong

    Well, when the 64 bit OneDrive client was reported I suggested that it was pointless because even VS didn't need 64 bit and remained 32 bit. How wrong I was! Clearly, this change is absolutely essential.

    I can't wait to create my 5GB projects that are fully loaded into memory. Now, where did I leave that design I had for a massively bloated application that has every bell and whistle and no focus?

    1. karlkarl Silver badge

      Re: I guess I was wrong

      To be fair, Microsoft are probably thinking of removing the bundled 32-bit support (WoW64 layer) and selling it as an optional extra through their little store platform.

      If their flagship IDE required it, this might be a little embarrasing or prevent uptake.

      1. Malcolm 1

        Re: I guess I was wrong

        Never going to happen

        Seems more likely that the work required to remove 32bit assumptions might come in handy if you wanted to create, say, an ARM64 version.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: I guess I was wrong

      And what do you do when the x86 support is removed from AMD64 chips? There's a heap of software that is more or less loudly deprecating x86 in its ≤ 32-bit modes.

      Or do you want to go back to 8086?

    3. 9Rune5

      Re: I guess I was wrong

      You weren't 100% wrong, but you weren't 100% correct either.

      One could easily butt heads with various limitations. E.g. debugging .net memory leaks was problematic, because the debugger could easily conclude that any memory dump bigger than a couple of gigabytes was simply a bridge too far.

      Now, they rectified that problem to some extent (spawn off a separate process for the debugger I think), but it was unnecessary to begin with. Had devenv.exe been 64-bit to begin with, it would've just worked.

      There is also a performance angle here. Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon to harvest at least 7% performance gain from going 64-bit. I do not believe 32-bit code caught up with that. The extra registers alone is worth the price of admission.

      I suspect once VS2022 has matured through a major patch or two, it will be noticeably better than what we have now. I expect refactoring improvements on par with jetbrains' reSharper product. (I suspect the 32-bit limitations made such improvements difficult)

  4. chuBb.

    Probably a good thing although vs flies along at a decent pace for me on new projects a couple of the large accreteted solutions regularly need chunks of projects disabling to avoid out of memory errors and lots of swapping. Although forget about vs if your somehow stuck on having spinng rust instead of an ssd as your os/app drive

    To be fair to vs its performance has really improved with 2017 and 2019 versions its the third party add ons (reharper really not needed anymore thanks to built in refactoring tools, but it's unit test runner is so much better than the built in one) which kill performance.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Refreshed icons

    Deep joy

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Refreshed icons

      Least the keyboard shortcuts will remain unmolested

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Refreshed icons

        For now...

    2. Daedalus

      Re: Refreshed icons

      Alltime sometime deep joy of a full moon scintyladen dangly in the heavenly bode.

  6. TheSicilian

    Can they make it *not* a great place to develop 32-bit apps? Can we just make 32-bit apps *not a thing* any more? Yeah, yeah, some customers are going to whine and whine and whine...

    Two things:

    1) I can now get a Raspberry freaking Pi with 8GB of memory, and who, seriously, is still running 32-bit Windows, right now, today, that needs cutting-edge OS and library support? Even if you don't need more than 4GB of memory (really, 3.5GB in practical terms, given how x86 memory addressing works) where are these 32-bit CPUs coming from? Atoms from 2011? Core Duos from 2006? This is all stuff that Windows 10 is going to have a moderately hard time running on regardless. Desktop Windows should have gone 64-bit only a release or two after Windows Server did in 2012, Windows 10 32-bit is an abomination and doing away with it, at this point, would count as a mercy killing.

    2) Five gets you ten that these are the same people still maintaining COBOL code on their AS/400 systems, because blah blah legacy codebase whatever. Fine, use a legacy compiler for your legacy code on your legacy OS. Legacy! Unless you are talking about Legacy of Kain I'm really not interested... and I have a perfectly good Xbox with a 32-bit x86 CPU for that still, so, you know what? Forget it. It is right and correct that development environments drop support for Tinkertoy-based architectures, we are living in the future like it or not.

    1. karlkarl Silver badge

      There are likely more 32-bit Windows installs being used these days than Raspberry Pi. Especially in poorer countries.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        According to PassMark as of today 0.35% of Windows 10 installs are 32-bit.

        link

        1. Peter D

          0.35% of Windows installs are 32 bit

          Dulce et decorum est pro 32 bit mori.

      2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        But even more ARM 64 devices… also known as mobile phones.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sorry but 32bit vs 64bit has nothing to do with if it's a tinker toy architecture. If you think everything should be 64bit because it's better than 32bit, you are very wrong. You pick 32bit vs 64bit based on need.

      When you move to 64bit, you have doubled the pointer sizes, this then increases all the data structure sizes within visual studio. What fit in the cpu cache yesterday, doesn't today because it's usage just doubled, providing no advantage, just reducing performance as now you have cache misses.

      Next, what will having more than 4GB of Ram for your IDE do, allow you to load more of your source code at once? Most of the processes that could make extra use of 64bit are outside of the IDE process.

      Plugins, excessive, unoptimised plugins in the IDE may be able to make use of it and slow it down even more, but hey 64bit for the win.

  7. cawfee

    What about SSMS?

    It's essentially the same program, will I eventually be able to load those script files which you can export but not load?

  8. Daedalus

    Correction

    " Engineers accustomed to leaving ridiculous numbers of browser tabs open "

    s/Engineers/Idiots/

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