On the one hand, 64-bit Vista and Win7 appear to run just about any 32-bit app just fine, aside from stuff too tightly wound into the system and kernel. So while you have to get 64-bit AV protection, you can run any office or browser you like. Which is a good thing, because nobody seems interested in offering a Win64 version of anything.
A few projects sponsored by Google have produced Win64 binaries, such as Vim. No, not Gvim, this is the console version. Compare this with Linux/BSD land, where just about everything you can get at all can be had in 64-bit. Opera makes a Linux 64-bit version, but can’t be bothered to do it for Windows. OpenOffice.org folks, last time I checked, whine about the SDKs being hard to get or something. I’m not really sure, but they said they weren’t really interested. Sun, who is backing OO.org, did mange to make a 64-bit Java for Windows, but can’t be bothered to do it with StarOffice, which is OO.org with extra stuff added. This is the same Sun which came out with their own 64-bit hardware and OS a long time ago.
The problem comes, of course, because Win64 has a hard time assigning default apps to open certain files if the app in question doesn’t have a 64-bit handle. Of course, lots of hardware issues also arise, since the drivers would be 64-bit, and anything hooking into hardware drivers has to have a 64-bit handle. And then, if you run an app for handling really large files, bigger than 2GB (happens these days), it requires 64-bit addressing.
I suppose we are at that stage back when Windows first came out. Getting folks to move from 16-bit to 32-bit was long in coming. Today we have tons of developers who think in 32-bit because that’s where they start. Anything 64-bit is a port from 32. Nobody is starting with 64 from scratch as a fundamental design factor. Maybe someday soon they’ll quit dragging their feet.
But what do I know? I’m just a computer user.
