Oh, and distributing separate builds for both architectures on windows isn't really ideal, there isn't that much reason to care about both 32-bit and 64-bit builds on windows anymore. All 64-bit windows is completely backwards compatible to 32-bit now (after the big failure of Intel's Itanium, and the victory of AMD's x86-64 architecture which is now in Intel machines).
Basically, if you want to make a binary distribution and don't need 64-bit features for your app, 32-only will be perfectly fine for all end-users. If you need 64-bit features, well then you can't really make a 32-bit version anyways, so it's 64-bit only.
64-bit code is often faster when it's been optimized for it (mostly cause compilers can target newer processors), but in general there are no significant 64-bit performance improvements, because the system bus and vector math have both been 128-bit since SSE, which is on both 32 and 64-bit processors, so if code is *really* optimized already, 64-bit adds nothing. Also, x86-64 is not a rework of the instruction set - it's actually just an extension of 32-bit x86 that adds some 64-bit ops, so compiled code for both platforms is usually extremely similar.
On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:34 PM, James Paige
<Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Does anybody on list have any experience with having both 32-bit
python+pygame+py2exe and 64-bit python+pygame+py2exe installed
simultaneously on the same system? That seems ideal for being able to
distribute executables for both architechtures