News Adobe preps 64-bit Air build

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/05/06/adobe-preps-64-bit-air-build/1

Adobe has announced a 64-bit build of its Air Internet application platform - although it's currently in a closed alpha and only supports the Linux operating system.

 

Maybe I'm stupid, but how hard can it be really to make this 64 bit? Surely the compiler does most of the heavy lifting?

 

amacieli - compilation isn't a remedy for everything Some 'strange' bugs appear while porting software to 64bit environment. It usually comes from inproper coding or using quite old parts of code. When you'll finaly compile your code without errors you can notice really strange application behavior. Debugging this can take quite a lot of time in such cases

 

I can never understand this either, I can't see Air being written in assembly. If anyone has any idea why 64-bit versions of air, flash, java have taken so long, please share

 

For one thing data types get longer in 64 bit. In 32 bit eg. an int and a long are the same length (32 bits). In 64 bit an int is still 32 bits, while a long is 64 bits. And yes, this can very easily cause problems. Pointers and handles can also cause problems going from 32 to 64 bits. And that's just off the top of my hat.

That being said, going from 16 bit to 32 bit was even worse.

 

I'm sick of waiting for 64 bit Flash, just so I can benefit from my 64 bit editions of IE and Firefox...

Adobe had better hurry up, it's been how many years since x64 was developed? 5? 6? They've had plenty of time.

 

I installed 64 bit fox and did not like it one bit so I don't see a benefit coming soon for me in the 64 bit area of flash(by soon I mean next 3 months).

 

It depends on the compiler, but at least using the Microsoft C++ compiler an int is 32 bits and a long is 64 bits no matter whether you are compiling for 32 bit or 64 bit. Probably the biggest problem is that your pointer sizes change. This could be a problem if your loading structs with a fixed layout size.

It could also be a problem in graphics code depending on how they do it.

 

Why we need to start building forward-compatibility into programming languages.

 

Sorry, but that's just not true. On 32 bit and using MSVC an int and a long have the same size, namely 32 bit.

Try this:

Code:

std::cout << sizeof(int) << std::endl;
std::cout << sizeof(long) << std::endl;

The result in both cases will be 4 as in 4 bytes as in 32 bits...