Visual Studio 64 bit?

Question

Is there any 64 bit Visual Studio at all? Why not?

Visual Studio for Mac is 64-bit, and Visual Studio Code is 64-bit. — Aaron Franke
@MartijnPieters sorry, I don't get the reasoning, it's either Yes/No (it's easily provable, can't be too broad, there's literally 1 answer), and it's not asking for a link, just whether it exists. I can see this getting an answer or an update if Microsoft ever releases a 64 bit version, though to be fair, that might never happen. To be fair the comments did devolve into "Microsoft should do X or Y" or "that blog post is nonsense because ____" but it's not the question's fault, necessarily. — jrh
The debugger now almost eats up 3GB and refuses to load more pdb's. I suppose a Visual Studio x64 wouldn't give in in such situation. — gast128

Joey Joey · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-25T14:45:56

For numerous reasons, No.

Why is explained in this MSDN post.

First, from a performance perspective the pointers get larger, so data structures get larger, and the processor cache stays the same size. That basically results in a raw speed hit (your mileage may vary). So you start in a hole and you have to dig yourself out of that hole by using the extra memory above 4G to your advantage. In Visual Studio this can happen in some large solutions but I think a preferable thing to do is to just use less memory in the first place. Many of VS’s algorithms are amenable to this. Here’s an old article that discusses the performance issues at some length: https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/joshwil/should-i-choose-to-take-advantage-of-64-bit

Secondly, from a cost perspective, probably the shortest path to porting Visual Studio to 64 bit is to port most of it to managed code incrementally and then port the rest. The cost of a full port of that much native code is going to be quite high and of course all known extensions would break and we’d basically have to create a 64 bit ecosystem pretty much like you do for drivers. Ouch.

Visual Studio 64 bit?

7 Answers