I would like to know if there is going to be a 64 bit version of Scrivener for Windows 10 in the future. This would be very helpful. Although the 32 bit version works fine, a 64 bit version would do very well on a 64 bit computer. In preference a 64 bit computer is supposed to run 64 bit programs.
If you wanted to peruse the open beta, you would see that it comes for download in both 32-bit and 64-bit formats.
However, the notion that 64-bit programs are always better on 64-bit operating systems is actually not true! A lot of it depends on the nature of the data, IO, and amount of data that you are using. 64-bit programs basically are able to access a lot bigger memory space directly – 32 bits are limited to around 4GB of memory addressing. Unless you’re playing around with very large amounts of data, this is not usually beneficial.
Where the 32-bit to 64-bit gap can help depends on how well programmed the 32-bit transition layer on a 64-bit operating system is. On the initial 64-bit Windows versions, the WoW (Windows on Windows layer) that runs a 32-bit address space for all the 32-bit programs had performance issues and could get easily overloaded. However, over time, those issues got ironed out, and on modern versions of Windows, 32-bit applications compiled on modern compilers show very little (if any) performance differences with 64-bit counterparts.
And sometimes, there are reasons to stay on 32-bit code! For a long time, even after the Office suite offered a 64-bit version, most enterprises continued to deploy the 32-bit version because many of their users’ required plug-ins had not been updated to be 64-bit compatible. Most people never even noticed the difference.
So either way, the new version of Scrivener is going to be a great step up – and you can join the open beta and preview it now, in either 32 or 64 bits.