nice to see this on hn. the dev has just announced[1] start of codebase migration from vb6 to twinbasic which should negate all of the cons described in the article.
xyplorer has been providing partial compatibility with 64-bit windows shells by way of some "sidecar" executables, which act like hosts for 64-bit shell extensions, thumbnailers, and whatnot.
iirc some of these sidecar tools were originally written in autohotkey; now that's another interesting language.