64-bit installer

[Rob McDonell]

Is there any thought that there will ever by a fully 64 bit version of the installer that Inno Setup creates? The current 32-bit version won't work on MacOS Catalina.

Thanks,

Rob.

[Gavin Lambert]

Now that Inno 6 has dropped support for older versions of Windows (and
the older versions of Delphi used to build itself), it's possibly more
likely than it used to be, but I imagine it'd still be quite a lot of
work for not much benefit (other than being one more thing that can
cause script incompatibility).

(Martijn might correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a 64-bit Inno would
only be able to install 64-bit apps, in part because {sys} redirection
doesn't work the other way around.)

Even today, when 32-bit OSes are basically dead, most Windows software
is still 32-bit, and other than games and other memory-hog apps there's
not much benefit to making an app 64-bit-only.

So not being able to run 32-bit Windows apps seems like a defect in
whatever emulator you're using. All versions of actual Windows can run
them just fine (unless you uninstall a component in Windows Server, but
nobody does that).

[Tomasz Sowinski]

Fully 64-bit installer would be useful for installing 64-bit Windows software on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and later. Please note that Apple removed the support for 32-bit software from their desktop OS, so the issue is not a 'defect in an emulator'. With Wine it is possible to run 64-bit applications, but if the application's installer is made with InnoSetup it's not going to run, as it's a 32-bit exe. 

Depending on the application, the userbase on the Mac may or may not exist. Ours is around 5%, but it is important 5%. We'd greatly appreciate the 64-bit InnoSetup build.

[Edmund Cramp]

I'm not a MAC user but in the Windows world, 64-bit applications are larger and run slower than 32-bit applications.  I see very little advantage in moving to a 64-bit version.

[Benoît LeBlanc]

The advantage is being to do cross compiling. I use innosetup in a cross platform project where I'm able to create both the mac and windows installers in the same process, running from a mac. Unfortunately it's not feasible on the latest version of MacOS which does not support executing 32 bit apps.

The speed and size of the installer are less relevant in this scenario.

[Will Lunniss]

I've just come across another scenario where a 64-bit installer is needed. I've been working on getting our software packaged in a docker container and wanted to target the Windows Nano Server based image as it's small and has everything needed to run our software (which has been 64-bit only for a few years now). However, because Nano Server only supports 64-bit executables (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/getting-started-with-nano-server) I cannot run the installer despite the software being able to run just fine within it. As a workaround I'm having to install our software using the larger Server Core image and then copy everything over afterwards, which is slow, takes up a lot more space to build, and relies on the fact that in a CLI only mode we don't need any of the registry entries that are normally set by the installer.

[Eivind Bakkestuen]

Somebody should set up a donation target for this particular feature, and those who need it could vote with their $$$. :)

Nothing is really free in this world.

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