With the announcement today that the upcoming Apple iPhone 5S will be using a 64-bit A7 CPU, it looks like 64-bit gaming will be coming to iOS mobile before consoles. It is probably a safe bet that 64-bit CPUs will be used on the next gen Apple iPads as well—perhaps later this fall.
Earlier this year, SkookumScript was updated to run on 64-bit platforms (in addition to 32-bit platforms). This was primarily to get ready for the upcoming next gen consoles (Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One) and of course 64-bit Windows and Unix-based PCs. This means that SkookumScript should also be ready to go for 64-bit iOS apps.
SkookumScript has been tested on actual Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One development kits in the wild, and it works great. PC 64-bit runs like a charm as well.
64-bit SkookumScript hasn’t been tested on a physical Apple iPhone 5S—since they aren’t available yet—though it should work just fine.
Hooray for being future-proof!
Advantages of 64-bit
64-bit games (compared to 32-bit) should be faster on average, and potentially allow access to more memory on platforms that place limits (commonly 2GB or 4GB) below what is available.
The 64-bit SkookumScript game runtime takes advantage of a number of 64-bit enhancements in both speed and greater available memory. Compiled scripts are mostly bit-independent—currently the only difference between 32-bit and 64-bit compiled binaries are some values indicating the the amount of memory they take up once they are dynamically loaded.