which download of activestate perl 5.24 do i need?

Question

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I need to install the perl 5.24 binary.

at http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads I get two choices: download activeperl 5.24.0 for windows (x86) download activeperl 5.24.0 for windows (64-bit, x64)

Which of those two do I need?

Call me dense but I don't find my answer at How can I check whether my Perl installation is 32 or 64 bit? whether-my-perl-installation-is-32-or-64-bit, although it does tell how to display several version-related characteristics

• perl -V:ivsize says ivsize='8';

• perl -V:archname says archname='MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int';

• perl -v says

This is perl 5, version 20, subversion 1 (v5.20.1) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int (with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2014, Larry Wall

Binary build 2000 [298557] provided by ActiveState

http://www.ActiveState.com Built Oct 15 2014 22:10:49

Please help. Phil

Answer 1

As your system is 64 bit. So I suggest you to install 64-bit, x64 one. You can install 32 bit also. 64 bit system support both 64 bit and 32 bit. But in case of 64 bit performance will be better.

Answer 2

As Arijit says, you should default to the 64-bit version as it will handle larger numerical values more efficiently and allows access to larger memory pools.

Exceptions include:

• Your machine has less than 4GB of memory & you need to be stingy with what you've got.
• You need to interface with a 32-bit only library on your computer for which you don't have access to a 64-bit version. I know of at least one ODBC driver that still fits this bill. Though for the customer that needs this I generally use perlapp to wrap up a dedicated 32-bit .exe file.