[visual-studio] Visual Studio 64 bit?

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

This question is related to visual-studio 64-bit

The answer is


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.


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,


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


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://docs.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.


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