Microsoft Visual Studio has the best c++ debugger. You get spoiled by it. Highly recommend it. If you are a beginner start with Visual Studio; it will make lots of things easier for you. Once Microsoft ports it to Linux the competition is fucked.
MS has explicitly stated they dont intend or expect to make VS 64-bit in any near timeframe. They say they dont need to because the components that would benefit from 64 bit are already out of process and communicate to the main UI over IPC.
That said, nothing stops a 32 bit VS building/debugging a 64 bit process. I was doing this 10+ years ago.
MS doesn't support running VS at all on Linux/Mac, and probably won't ever, or for a very long time out. Use VS Code, instead. Yes, you can target Linux/Mac from Windows running VS, but VS wont run on the same OS.
The blog post is 10 years old, the reasoning was poor then and has not aged well. No mention of the performance benefits of extra registers, new instructions, security benefits, etc.
The only advantage I can see to staying 32-bit is that Windows on ARM64 only has an x86 emulator, not x86_64.
I think there’s a 0% chance of a Linux port: VS Code is the cross-platform/future dev environment for Microsoft. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a 64-bit Visual Studio is coming soon to Windows.
The new instructions are generally special-purpose, Visual Studio doesn't sound like an obvious target for vectorisation. Security is meaningless - VS is not on a security boundary. The memory size cost disadvantage is real, though.
It is very nice .. but I suspect that even Microsoft have realised it has serious maintainability issues within itself, so it will probably never be ported. Expect VSCode to acquire a comparable debugging plugin instead.
