tim Rowledge writes:
Somebody is going to have to explain this to me. Why would you have to "change into a 32bit environment" ?
On a 64-bit machine, a 32-bit VM has to use the appropriate runtime libraries.
Oh, duh. '64 bit' makes noises in my head about 64 bit OOPs. Never mind.
There's also the possibility that the AMD64 instruction set is faster than AMD32 especially if you're using a 32 bit image so are not paying for extra memory bandwidth for each oop. The reason is increasing the number of registers from 8 (6-7 usable) to 16.
This may not matter for the interpreter given branch mispredicts due to decoding.
Bryce