Software idea...yay or nay?

[neonerd]

Is there such a program already on the market that recompiles existing 32bit code into 64bit code in say, a few easy steps or a wizard type of thing? I just thought that for all the developers, it would be much easier. For example....instead of spending months on recompiling operating systems, you could go through an easy wizard with a few steps, and it would automatically do it for you in a few days or so...what do you all think?

 

[MalikChen]

Uh, if you want to take a 32 bit binary and turn it into a 64 bit one, it would be almost impossible. You can't really alter binaries like you want to. What might be possible is to have something that takes 32bit source and makes it 64bit compatible, but again, you're going to spend the time compiling either way.

 

[Fox3a]

I can see making it 64 bit compatible, but an operating system.... The operating system has to know how to address it to those extra bits, so you can't just do that. If you can, I'm sure MS will do it... 😛

 

[imgod2u]

If you have the source code, it'd be as simple as to compile to target x86-64. There's really no need to change anything unless you specifically wrote the code to use PAE or something in order to handle cases where more than 4GB of address space is needed. In which case you simply remove the PAE code and use long pointers.

If you don't have the original source code, then it's possible but not really safe/legal even to do so. You'd have to decompile a binary executable and that kinda stuff does not reproduce the original source code and it is, in many cases of copyrighted software, illegal.