> Eh, unless you absolutely need the addressable memory, there's no real reason to move a legacy codebase to native 64-bit unless the software absolutely needs

> Eh, unless you absolutely need the addressable memory, there's no real reason to move a legacy codebase to native 64-bit unless the software absolutely needs the RAM. Unless it can take advantage of the extra opcodes that are only available on x86-64 hardware. I think AVX is the best example here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions > Using things like longs(especially if you're targeting both Linux and Windows), and assumed pointer lengths can bite you in the ass if you're not careful(and there is a special circle of hell reserved for people who think bitshifting on a pointer type is fine). A few minutes doing some preventative #defines can save you a world of hurt, especially when porting to the next largest system. Or investigate the types in stddef.h, such as ptrdiff_t: > It is a type able to represent the result of any valid pointer subtraction operation. > A pointer subtraction is only guaranteed to have a valid defined value for pointers to elements of the same array (or for the element just past the last in the array). http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstddef/ptrdiff_t/ http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstddef/ptrdiff_t/ Trying to mess with #define stuff is only a good idea if you're targeting older or somewhat nonconformant compilers. The includes were written by the compiler authors; trust them to know more about their compiler than you do.