What is the quantifiable benefit of 64 bit for Visual Studio Code over 32 bit

Question

I\'m not a hardware guy, but I know that Visual Studio in a 64 bit version issue request was declined by Microsoft stating that a 64 bit version would not have good performance.

Answer 1

I haven't worked much on windows but have interacted with x86, x64 and ARM (Both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set size) processors. Based on my experience, before writing the code in 64-bit format we thought: Do we really need 64-bit size instructions? If our operation can be performed within 32 bits, then why shall we need another 32 bits?

Think of it like this: You have a processor with 64-bit address and 64-bit data buses and 64-bit size registers. Almost all of the instructions of your program requires maximum 32 bits. What will you do? Well, I think there are two ways now:

1. Create a 64-bit version of your program and run all the 32-bit instructions on your 64-bit processor. (Wasting 32-bits or your processor in each instruction cycle, and filling the Program Counter with an address which is 4 bytes ahead). Your application / program which could have been executed in 256 MB of RAM now requires 512 MB, due to which other programs or processes running on the RAM will suffer.

2. Keep the program format to 32-bit and combine 2 32-bit instructions to be pushed into your 64-bit processor for execution.

Obviously, second approach will run faster with the same resources.

But yes, if your program is containing more instructions which are really 64-bit in size; For eg. Processing 4K videos (Better on 64-bit processor with 64-bit instruction set) or performing floating-points operations with up to 15 decimal digit precision, etc. Then, it is better to create 64-bit program file.

Long story in short: Try to write compact software and leverage the hardware as much as possible.

So far, what I have read Here, Here and Here; I came to know that most of the components of VS require only 32-bits instruction size.

Hope it explains.

Thanks