Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > Why: > Somebody thought it was a good idea for a 64-bit > system to have all the apps be 32-bit.
As one of the people that made the decision that the majority (not all) apps be 32-bit, I can say without hesitation that it was the right choice! > This means that a 32-bit app has to use larger > and slower data types to handle some of its data. This is only true if you want one binary which can run on both systems and it needs the larger data types. There is nothing stopping you from creating two binaries, one for 32-bit kernels and one for 64-bit kernels. If you have a problem with common binaries (for the very very very few apps that it even matters), you need to talk with the application programers, since the changes to apps like "top" are not forced on you by our decision to execute 32-bit apps on our 64-bit kernel. Peter
