Visual Studio 64 bit?

Question

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

Ferd

See blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/… – Logion

Visual Studio for Mac is 64-bit, and Visual Studio Code is 64-bit. – Valvulitis

@MartijnPieters If this question had the "Why not" edited out could it be re-opened? Note that the OP didn't add the "Why not?", it was added for some reason by a >2k rep user. – Uel

@jrh: nope, sorry. It'd still be too broad and a request to find an off-site resource. – Dredge

@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. – Uel

Please take your case to Meta Stack Overflow if you want to see this reopened. – Dredge

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. – Axseed

Year 2020 and Visual Studio is still 32-bit :-( – Pb

devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022 – Downey

and finally, VS2022 is going to be 64 bit. – Balfour

@Uel - the link to the MS blog has been deleted, here's the archived version to retain the content of your comment. web.archive.org/web/20190803021832/https://… – Spline

Answer 1

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://learn.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.

Hightension

His arguments make little sense. Even if the new XML office formats are free of portability issues, Office64bit will still have to support old doc/xls files. I hope. On the other hand I completely agree with him: 90% of apps do not need to be ported to 64bit. Unfortunately that's not 90% of the customers think. They all demand native 64bit now :( – Giesecke

@MK: The office "recreational speculation" doesn't survive the sniff test. Nonetheless, the part of the article relevant to the question (re: VS x64) seems pretty solid. – Ommatidium

Is it me, or is this just a copy of lingvomir's earlier answer? – Rhineland

@Jean-FrançoisCorbett, note that lingvomir's answer pre-dates the date of this question, likely because it originated on another question which was merged into this one =) – Twinflower

hmm, it seams they actually did it: Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 (version 15.1) (x86 and x64) - Released: 20/04/2017 – Triangular

While I generally agree as a developer that smaller is faster. VS Is not small. It is constantly hitting the maximum space for a 32bit app, and THEN it becomes smaller is slower. You can't have it both ways, either make it faster and smaller, or realize that it is too big and deal with that. – Pebble

@nebulasleuth, VS with a medium-size solution never takes more than 400 MiB RAM for me, and that's with R# which is one of the worst things for VS performance-wise. I'd look at extensions as culprit first. – Hightension

@joey. Its dependent on the project size. My VS with a large C#/C++ solution is always hovering between 1.5 and 2gb (that's just the IDE when idle). I don't have any extensions, just the default standard VS Enterprise install. – Pebble

@JakubPawlinski do you have a link to this? I can't seem to find any information about the version you mentioned. – Uel

Just working on a Project, that exausts 3GB Virtual Memory. Microsoft developers should stick their reasons in a place where the sun doesn't shine. This is my first job in a Windows world and i bet it is my last. I miss eclipse + gcc/clang so much already... – Colorful

@Uel go to my.visualstudio.com/… select Visual Studio Community 2017 (version 15.0) and see info - filename is mu_visual_studio_community_2017_version_15.0_x86_x64_100376719.exe – Triangular

@JakubPawlinski I've been running Visual Studio 2017 (15.9) for a while and it's definitely a 32 bit application (you can tell by looking in the task manager); are you saying only version 15.0 is 64 bit and none of the newer versions are? – Uel

@Uel That's correct. They may a 64-bit version once and then for whatever reason decided not to do it again. – Richers

better to crash with OOM than to use more memory, good reasoning. – Fellowship

We have massive solution with 150 project's files and x86 version is problem. It crash every day severaltimes. It is not usable. – Barre

@Richers No there is definitely no 64 bit version of VS on Windows. They labeled all their downloads on that page as x86 x64. e.g. "Visual Studio Community 2019 (version 16.8) (x86 and x64) - (Multiple Languages)". You can see here they explain that this doesn't mean the main process (which is what everyone cares about) is 64 bit: developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/517541/…. – Ooze

There are problems with 32-bit VS - like OOM exceptions working with huge projects like LibreOffice, and trying to see their git history... There may be numerous "it is hard to do" arguments, but there's no real "this should not happen", only "we are not prepared to take the effort". imgur.com/SlxVzDJ – Unstrung

Answer 2

No! There is no 64-bit version of Visual Studio.

How to know it is not 64-bit: Once you download Visual Studio and click the install button, you will see that the initialization folder it selects automatically is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0

As per my understanding, all 64-bit programs/applications goes to C:\Program Files and all 32-bit applications goes to C:\Program Files (x86) from Windows 7 onwards.

Sextain

Not sure why this was down-voted; checking for (x86) is a useful litmus test. – Galibi

@MatthewKraus: Because most people who know they want a 64-bit Visual Studio will know about the Program Files naming convention. – Haygood

@Haygood Considering the number of up-votes this question has, lots of people are curious about whether VS is 64 bit and apparently would like some help figuring it out. This answer provides exactly that--it shows you how to figure it out by looking at which folder VS gets installed to. Anybody with access to a free or trial version can perform this test. To determine whether it's 32 or 64 bit, this answer provides a useful smoke test. Compared to other one-line answers that provide no references, this is a much more useful answer. – Galibi

The question is not if VS is 32 bit or 64 bit. It is if there is a 64 bit edition at all. – Citral

not having 64-bit folder doesn't mean that app doesn't have 64-bit version. Install 32-bit Firefox and it'll go to Program Files (x86). Does that mean there's no 64-bit Firefox? – Ivanivana

Actually the most simple way, for me, to find out if an App is 32 bit or 64 is to see if it has a star (*) next to its name in TaskManager. – Cabasset

which folder a program installs to is not actually necessarily tied to whether it's actually 32-bit or 64-bit. some programs wrongly install themselves to Program Files and not Program Files (x86) despite being 32-bit programs, for example. – Lectureship

Open it up in IDA pro and see if it is loading it at 4MiB or none of the instructions use the rex prefix. Or just look in task manager to see if it says *32 – Heshum

Answer 3

Update: April 19th 2021

Microsoft announced their preview Visual Studio 2022 64 bit

Quinte

Finally! Really really really happy. 15 years too late, but still better now than never. – Dangelo

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2022 is 64-bit

Visual Studio 2022 on Windows is now a 64-bit application. This means you can open, edit, run, and debug even the biggest and most complex solutions without running out of memory.

see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/whats-new-visual-studio-2022

Pb

And window11 64bit only – Marinetti

Answer 5

no, but it runs fine on win64, and can create win64 .EXEs

Aluminous

Unfortunately, cross-debugging is. – Theomancy

Irrelevant, the question is for working 64bit VS and ecosystem. Who cares about the ability to run 32bit on a 64bit OS? – Mcfadden

@steelbytes as per DirkBester's response, it's irrelevant. The point of 64-bit Visual Studio is for your compilation environment to operate natively in 64-bit. Gain 64-bit process memory space. Execute native 64-bit instruction sets for compiling and so on. Creating 64-bit programs, everyone knows we can already do that on 32-bit Visual Studio. – Console

This is so not helpful and does not answer the question at all. – Sacco

Answer 6

No, but the 32-bit version runs just fine on 64-bit Windows.

Alcock

It runs fine until allocated memory is relatively small. When it goes > 2gb it becomes extremely slow and invokes GC every second. – Ocd

Not when I need to debug my web app that has native dependencies (thanks to Oracle). – Chiang

Blend is totally broken, both for the built in version and standalone. You have to target "x86" or "Any CPU" so that you can see your xaml, then retarget 64 so you can run and debug. Ditto edit and continue. The list goes on. It is so totally not awesome, I do not have words fit to print. – Mcfadden

For larger solutions you can run out of memory. So it doesn't 'just run fine'. – Contrive

The profiler can run out of memory, see https://mcmap.net/q/101649/-c-visual-studio-2017-cpu-profiling-out-of-memory-exception/7556646. So it doesn't run fine. – Pb

Try running a solution with 288 projects and Resharper... RIP Visual Studio memory – Ahrens

No, VS does not run fine. Even a moderately complex solution starts running into memory-related slowness, and to make matters worse, plenty of VS components leak memory, which exacerbates the issue. Something which gets worse with each new edition of VS. – Ling

VS2017 has locked up several times on my new Dell i7/Win10 64-bit machine, so I am not convinced that 32-bit VS always works fine on 64-bit windows. But the new PC is a bit flakely, and Dell is issuing lots of Device Driver updates currently, so perhaps caused by that, rather than VS itself? – Lavena

Unfortunately no, you can't design components in 32bit, #5379419 – Evanevander

Answer 7

Is there any 64 bit Visual Studio at all?

Yes literally there is one called "Visual Studio" and is 64bit, but well,, on Mac not on Windows

Why not?

Decision making is electro-chemical reaction made in our brain and that have an activation point (Nerdest answer I can come up with, but follow). Same situation happened in history: Windows 64!...

So in order to answer this fully I want you to remember old days. Imagine reasons for "why not we see 64bit Windows" are there at the time. I think at the time for Windows64 they had exact same reasons others have enlisted here about "reasons why not 64bit VS on windows" were on "reasons why not 64bit Windows" too. Then why they did start development for Windows 64bit? Simple! If they didn't succeed in making 64bit Windows I bet M$ would have been a history nowadays. If same reasons forcing M$ making 64bit Windows starts to appear on need for 64Bit VS then I bet we will see 64bit VS, even though very same reasons everyone else here enlisted will stay same! In time the limitations of 32bit may hit VS as well, so most likely something like below start to happen:

• Visual Studio will drop 32bit support and become 64bit,
• Visual Studio Code will take it's place instead,
• Visual Studio will have similar functionality like WOW64 for old extensions which is I believe unlikely to happen.

I put my bets on Visual Studio Code taking the place in time; I guess bifurcation point for it will be some CPU manufacturer X starts to compete x86_64 architecture taking its place on mainstream market for laptop and/or workstation,

Update: From the visualstudio 2022 preview site quoting https://web.archive.org/web/20211030202827/https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/preview/:

Our 64-bit upgrade Take advantage of all your computer’s resources to scale Visual Studio to the largest of projects and complex workloads without running out of memory. You can continue to run and debug your 32-bit apps.

It seems they did what I was expecting they are dropping old 32bit support, quoting https://web.archive.org/web/20210910130939/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/migration/update-visual-studio-extension?view=vs-2022:

Visual Studio 2022 RC is a 64-bit application, and introduces some breaking changes in the VS SDK

I want to thank every upvote for keeping this answer. As a thank you I want to add one more prediction: I still believe the trend will lean towards VSCode in time while VSCode forks or turns-into something like Eclipse Theia. Most probably they will give full support on cloud platforms with that. Especially for enterprises that will add great value and for the marketing sake I cannot find any better excuse about "move your onprem into the Azure" stuff. Anyhow seems we are correct about: Why Visualstudio was not 64 bit while it should be 64bit long ago,

Update: I think this will be the last update. Yes it was the direction I expected: https://vscode.dev/ deployed to public,

Ial

Afaik "why not we see 64bit Windows" problem did not exist - already win2k had a 64bit version, where not fully 32-bit systems were yet widely used. Only no one have used it. However, m$ has regularly serious troubles with such switches, it is probably because not even their teams can have really access to the source code of the others. – Stallard

@peterh-ReinstateMonica working on64bit and being 64bit are different itprotoday.com/compute-engines/… – Ial

@Ial No, Win2k had a really 64-bit version. Furthermore, this article has numerous errors, it is an end-user article written by an end-user (for example, he thinks PAE, which makes possible the usage of >4GB of RAM even on 32-bit OSes, is a specific feature of a specific intel cpu). – Stallard

@Stallard your example looks to me like Dos4GW makes MSDos 32bit. Anyhow my point was if MS stayed 32bit. Know what lets accept your claim for a moment: If MS stayed with PAE and awkward AWE and said we are 64bit this way, then it would still be a history; Not everyone has resources to rewrite the codebase, – Ial

PAE is exactly to avoid rewriting the code, but still using 64 bit features. Using PAE on a 32 bit kernel needs only minimal extension of the kernel (mostly, VM code). It is also possible to use the 64 bit registers with 32 bit pointers, resulting an about 30% acceleration compared to the 64 bit version of the same software. Processes having more than 4 GB address space are still rare, even today. Microsoft banned PAE on a very different reason: big corporate rigidity. – Stallard

I remember similar 32hybrid approach proposed in Linux with X32abi, it did not work as intended as it is just causing more problems than it solves until now. In Win32 closed source world the impact could be even worse. Apple Rosetta is counterproof to this but only they were successful on this, maybe it requires some hardware functionality to not cripple performance while safely emulating? – Ial

@Abdurramin The essence of my statement was that the refered article is a VLQ thing full with layman misunderstoods and superficial knowledge. x32 exists on Linux, it is in an early development phase and probably remains there forever. On Windows, Microsoft initally supported PAE until win7sp1 (and in analogous servers), it was suddenly removed in sp2 on no reason. Later they said the reason stating this: PAE is essentially 64 bit code and the 32 bit license pays only for 32 bit code. Already this reasoning says that they had no real reason. – Stallard

@Abdurraming But it was imho a good thing. Fact is that >4GB address space is absolutely not needed for most software, while it could accelerate things a lot. – Stallard