Reasons for either 32-bit or 64-bit as development machine
- by vartec
I'm about to make a new Linux install, which will be primarily used for programming. I've seen benchmarks showing speed improvement of 64-bit version, however, I have hard time of telling how much these benchmarks translate to improvement in every day usage. And of course there are other aspects to consider.
Usage I have in mind:
mainly programming Python, with occasional C, C++ and Java;
IDEs, which are using Java platforms (Eclipse and IntelliJ);
on very rare occasions having to compile for 32-bit platform;
not planning to have more than 64GB of RAM anytime soon (and I don't mind using PAE kernels);
machine in question has 4GB RAM and Athlon II X2;
What are pros and cons of choosing either i386 or x86_64 distro?
