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Title: Mac binaries no longer 64-bit Post by: toffoo on December 04, 2011, 05:40:47 AM I just realized that at least the last two versions (0.4 and 0.5) of the Mac OS X builds distributed from the main SourceForge links are 32-bit binaries. I am almost certain they used to be 64-bit apps. Just curious, why the change and are there any plans to compile future releases as 64-bit again? Title: Re: Mac binaries no longer 64-bit Post by: Gavin Andresen on December 05, 2011, 12:00:19 AM Just curious, why the change and are there any plans to compile future releases as 64-bit again? Why the change: because it is twice as fast to compile just 32-bit, a 32-bit-only executable is smaller and faster to download, and there is no advantage to running 64-bit (bitcoin doesn't need more than 4 gigabytes of memory, there are no performance-critical routines that would be faster running 64-bit, etc). If there's a good reason to compile 64-bit, or if we ever drop support for 32-bit Macs then a 64-bit version would make sense. |