LiveCode Forums.

Hello lovely people!

I'm trying to understand what the most prominent implications are between building and releasing Standalones with LiveCode x64 versus x32, especially on Windows. There is scarce information available, if any at all. Does the x64 have any improved performance over the x32 version?

I'd highly appreciate some feedback on the issue.

I'm about to release a LiveCode app soon with heavy text processing and I'm facing the dreadful pdf printing issues that the x64 edition of LiveCode has on Windows. So, would it make any difference if I released my app for x32 instead of x64?

Warmest regards,
Anton

@Tonaras: So functionally there is little difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit windows engines - the exact same C++ code is compiled and the exact same system APIs are used.

The main difference is that 64-bit windows processes do not have the 'total 3gb of memory available' limit - so you can have a lot more data in variables in memory at once (you can easily see the memory usage of your running app in Task Manager - if it never approaches 3gb then this probably won't be an issue).

In terms of performance, then its swings and roundabouts really - typically 64-bit processors have a larger working set because pointers are 8 bytes rather than 4 bytes (so, for example, the processor has to wade through twice as many bytes to iterate over LC array compared to 32-bit mode), but 64-bit code is generally a little more efficient due to the increased number of registers (which means compilers can generate more optimal code).

In regards to the printing related bugs - I've posted some updates on them in the quality center - you might want to check that email notifications are turned on if you haven't received any updates - we updated bugzilla recently and (for some unknown reason) some user's accounts had their notification preferences reset!

@LCMark

Thanks VERY MUCH for clarifying Mark! Until your answer I had the impression that the x64 Engine is just a x64 wrapper for the x32 Engine which would not make any substantial difference. I'm glad that I was wrong and that it makes perfect sense to stick with the x64 Engine!

In regards to the printing related bugs, I have done some further digging and through my new findings I discovered that using the x32 Engine to overcome the print problems that are seemingly prominent in x64 is not a solution. The x32 Engine has the exact same troubles as the x64, albeit they start kicking in many printed pages later. Please check my detailed replies on bugzilla for this.

Best regards,
Anton