Why 64-bit application's should like to .so only ??

[rkirankumar]

Hello All,
As my subject title says, Why 64-bit applications should link to only shared libraries (.so) only ??? Why can't it be linked to static libraries (.a) ???
One more question in attach to it is.
1. What are the specific advantages of 64-bit applicaitons ???
I know like we will have a better application responsiveness (performance) if we go for 64-bit application because of large address space. But, unfortunately when i port my 32-bit application to 64-bit, in reverse my application performance has been degraded by 1/3. So, what would've gone wrong in my porting ???
I suspect this because of .so linkage. Basically application's linked with static library perform better than shared library.


regards,
Kiran.

[Roxoff]

Surely, you'd need to get 64 bit versions of the static libraries to be able to link against them?

There are many improvements that you can take advantage of in the 64 bit world, not just in memory addressing (the 64 bit memory management on AMD64, for instance, is significantly quicker as it's much simpler). You also have many more registers available, and they're bigger, so you can hold more parameters in registers when making function calls rather than burying them on the stack.