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I thought the main problem with porting software to 64-bit was the bad practice of developers assuming the sizes of types. Since this was Google and the project is relatively recent, I'm assuming that is not the reason.

Why couldn't you take the chromium source (and dependencies) and compile them for x64 months ago?



As the blog post says, the linux version has been 64-bit since 2009. So the problem must be windows API, not type sizes.


A bit of history: osx [0] and windows [1]

IIRC most issues revolve around plugins and performance (notably V8), possibly not directly because of type sizes but similar low level stuff that hampers JS-to-the-metal optimisations.

Still waiting on OSX though.

[0]: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=8606

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=18323


Linux, MacOS, and nearly all other Unix-y things use LP64 (int is 32bit, long is 64bit). Windows x86_64 uses LLP64 (int is 32bit, long is 32bit). This can make porting a pain.




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