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Comment by mohdmasd | Hacker News Reader

But this time it's (almost) full windows, and it can run x86 application.

Clarification: Only 32 but apps. Not 64 bit apps, which the Windows world has almost fully moved to. And I’m sure they would run at reduced performance as well.

most non-compute intensive programs still are compiled for 32-bit, or have 32 bit versions available. also, visual studio still defaults to 32 bit when creating a new c++ project.

You can even get Slack for Windows in 32-bit, although I suspect you'd hit the nasty 4gb limitation pretty quickly

I thought it was odd that a single application would even hit the limit. Then I realized Electron.

Some people might consider that a blessing in disguise with Slack.

I'm not sure what the behavior is, maybe best case Slack crashes and restarts itself. You could almost call that behavior a feature of 32bit Slack: "automatic garbage collection"

Garbage collection isn't strong enough: it doesn't collect the garbage generator which is Slack

Almost anything compiled for 32bit windows would work just as well on a beefy tablet. Laptops and Desktops are, more and more, being reserved for power users and computationally heavy tasks.

> Laptops and Desktops are, more and more, being reserved for power users and computationally heavy tasks

I'm not seeing this in the business world. Yes, there are some tablets in use, but their numbers are still very small in comparison to desktop and laptop computers. And a huge majority of these users are definitely not what I would call "power users".

Reminds of the early nineties when MS was keeping everyone in the 16-bit world. Win 95 was this amazing kludge that straddled 16 and 32 bits. Thankfully they’re not the monopoly they once where.

For what it's worth, Windows NT 4.0 ("full windows") ran on DEC Alpha, and using FX!32 emulation, executed x86 Win32 apps. There was even a 64-bit build of NT running internally at Microsoft as a proof-of-concept, but wasn't publicly released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2008.08.windowsc...

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