What's the situation regarding the 64bit executable?
 

I know Oleg stated that there would be both 32 and 64bit executables available at launch and obviously we only got the 32bit one but did Luthier or anybody else ever mention the 64bit one in regards to it's eventual release or not?

Look around in the folders, you will find a bunch of filenames with '64' in them, others with '86'. It could be that the 64 bit version is just switched off...I guess once they consider the code clean enough bugwise (and memorywise) then they will enable it, probably as a future beta. My guess.

Hmmmm, if I was a competitor, I'd be squirming.........:-D

Pardon my ignorance, but what would a 64-bit exe bring to the table?

Because 64 bits are more than 32 bits therefore it has to be better. Seriously though, I couldn't care less about that right now, just make the 32-bit version work properly please.

Larger memory space. More memory.

2 to the power of 32 is 4GB. Windows and stuff take close to 2 GB, so 2 left for applications. If you have more than 4 and you use a 32 bit OS, you never use anything above 4. Now if you have, say, 8 GB, that is 6 GB for applications if you use a 64bit OS.

That does not accelerate applications as such, but depending on how the app manages the memory, it could. For instance by pre-loading a bunch of stuff in memory that would have been on disk. More important is the fact that your app can be much bigger and powerful.

IF a application is 64 bit, it CAN run faster than the 32 bit equivalent, as it can pump more data with one cycle. That doesn`t mean though, that a 64 bit app is automatically twice as fast than a 32 bit app because the bus is twice the size.

Apps which through around huge masses of data, like databases, encoding, CAD, but also games CAN be faster with 64 bit.

64-bit executable will likely bring only minimal performance gains.

I'd rather see a host of other bugs fixed, new sound, better graphics, etc. before they waste time on a 64 bit executable.

64 bit users are elitist

That may well be the case.

I was knocked out by the difference in rendering times between Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 (32-bit) and the more recent CS5 64-bit). However, Adobe worked very closely with Nvidia to fully exploit Nvidia's CUDA structure calling it their Mercury rendering engine to reduce to mere seconds the video processing which formerly took minutes -- or even hours. Playback of even huge multitrack video & audio files were now smooth as silk, and not choppy as before in the earlier 32-bit CS4 version. Stability and fewer-to-no crashes have been a major benefit, too.

But, I agree as you imply: 64-bit programming isn't necessarily the magic answer. Adobe threw their massive software programming resources into the CS5 project, and have refined it even more very recently with a 5.5 update. It may be unrealistic to expect a smaller dev operation like 1C to fully capitalize on 64-bit potential in any meaningful way (frame-rates, stutters, stability) than what they could more readily achieve with their current 32-bit coding optimization. And I, for one, don't wanna wait another 7 years to find out! :)