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Waiting for 64bit

For years we are waiting now for 64bit support in both Xojo and FileMaker. And I get plenty of people asking for features to be added to plugins which will only work once we have 64bit support:
  • Use newer Mac OS X frameworks like MapKit, EventKit, Social, Accounts and others. All the new goodies from Apple require apps which use 64bit.
  • Use more memory, e.g. raster huge poster PDFs in dynaPDF to 300 dpi bitmaps which easily needs more than 4 GB of memory.
  • Use newer VLC library with our MBS VLC Plugin. With version 2.1 VLC is 64bit only, so we can't load the libraries.
  • On Linux with 64bit, we need to install 32 bit compatibility libraries. But not every lib is available there, so some things will not work.
  • For database access (e.g. ODBC drivers), we already face the problem, that often 64bit only library comes by default and users have trouble getting 32bit one installed. Especially if people have 64bit Windows and create a ODBC data source with 64bit driver and our 32 bit app does not see it.
  • Use faster 64 bit math. But both in Xojo and FileMaker this will not make a big difference as number crunching is normally not a bottleneck in our solutions.
So we do hope FileMaker and Xojo will get this done next year and provide us with a stable 64bit version of their software, so we can add all this nice features.

PS: FileMaker 12 has already a 64bit server for CWP.
20 11 13 - 13:26