Thanks for that clear explanation of what may (will?) be involved in converting an app from 32 bit to 64 bit.
Believe it or not that's far from the only issue. Think "preference files" (of the binary sort). Your 64 bit number won't fit where the 32 was, (8 bytes vs 4) so now you have to create a new version of preference file too. Not only does that force the reading and writing of the file to change, but they must be savvy to both old and new, AND be able to tell the difference. AND you may still have to change some files. There are several other problems commonly ran into as well. What stinks the most is you can't just change a little at a time and test it. You have to spend all day (week? month?) changing all the stuff that needs changing, and then run it, and hope it doesn't completely barf. And if there's a new bug,
normally you'd just go look at the bit of code you just changed. But you just changed thousands of lines of code, in many dozens of places, so you've just lost a valuable response shortcut, and basically have to start your bug hunt from scratch for each and every new bug you find.
