Visual Studio 64 bit?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

Update: April 19th 2021

Microsoft announced their preview Visual Studio 2022 64 bit