[Python-Dev] Python on Windows 64bits?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Anthony Baxter wrote:
> Python's worked on the Alphas for approximately ever, and
> works on Itanium, so I can't imagine you'll find any 32-bit-isms
> left in the code.

Actually, there are plenty of them, however it is unlikely that
anybody will encounter them for a few more years.

The biggest problem is that the number of elements in a sequence
(string, list, tuple) is represented as "int", whereas it should
be a signed variant of size_t. I have a patch that corrects many
of these issues, but I plan to publish that only after 2.4. The
problem becomes only apparent if you have more than 2G items. For
a string, this might be a significant limitation. For a list, it
requires 16GiB of memory to represent the list alone, not accounting
for any items in the list, so very few people have sufficient
hardware to even run a test case that demonstrates the problem.

As for Alphas: their Windows port was a 32-bit port; Microsoft
did not have Win64 at that time.

Regards,
Martin