Comment by andai
4 years ago
You spooked me that Win11 had dropped support for 32-bit applications, but it seems they still work fine. There's no 32-bit version of the OS though.
4 years ago
You spooked me that Win11 had dropped support for 32-bit applications, but it seems they still work fine. There's no 32-bit version of the OS though.
Rather confusingly the death of the 32-bit version of Windows in practice just means they are dropping support for 16-bit DOS applications.
There is a WoW (windows on windows) subsystem which permitted you to either run 16-bit binaries on your 32-bit system, or 32-bit binaries on your 64-bit system; but there's no 16-on-64 or 16-on-32-on-64.
If you have a 64-bit version of Windows the compatibility layer[1] lives at `%SYSTEMROOT%\SysWoW64`.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows
You can use winevdm for this though, https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
I'm waiting for the day when people run Linux on windows via a hypervisor to run old programs under wine. This is pretty close.
3 replies →
> There is a WoW (windows on windows) subsystem
Oh my god, I always wondered why the WOW6432NODE registry key was named that but was never bothered enough to look it up. Thank you for triggering the random insight.
Yeah they worded that confusingly. That said, I feel like the writing is probably on the wall for 32-bit. My guess is this might be the real reason why they pushed for making Visual Studio 64-bit.