I compiled an 64bit binary of ioquake3 and an SDL binary to go along with it and I noticed on Windows 7 64bit, operation, while relatively stable, it doesn’t have top notch performance.
An equivalent binary on 64bit Debian, runs definitely faster, and perfectly stable.
And I’m thinking: with all the major manufacturers still dispatching 32bit binaries predominately – major exception I can think of is Autodesk’s Autocad – is Windows still immature on its 64bit libraries?
While Windows is slowly making strides towards 64-bitness, one could easily say that Linux has a massive, perhaps even crushing, advantage due to the wide variety of platforms that it has been made to work on. Issues that Windows developers are only coming across now have been long solved under Linux (although of course there are Linux developers who choose to ignore these solutions; their code tends to be brittle, and sometimes non-portable).