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While there are some Python experts around I have a question; in the world of Python 3 does it matter between 32-bit and 64-bit anymore? I remember a while back the only real option was 32-bit as most libraries were 32-bit only, especially on Windows where Python wasn't fantastically supported compared to Linux/OSX.


If you're downloading pre-built binaries like on Windows then unfortunately yes it does matter if you're using 32-bit or 64-bit libraries. Windows in general has always been a bit of a second class citizen with Python library support, although it will hopefully improve with easier access to compilers (there's a free version of visual studio tools for python library compilation apparently now). If you just want a lot of libraries that 'just work' you're probably best served using a pre-built distribution like Anaconda. If you're more adventurous this page has all kinds of pre-built libraries for Windows in both 32 and 64 bit: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

Alternatively it's insanely easy to spin up a Linux VM with vagrant and just compile and run python scripts from there. Everything will pip install without any issues.


Windows is a second class citizen for most language library support, that being said though Python does a great job of having the most recent versions available for Windows. The same can't be said of Ruby unfortunately. :(


Many thanks for the replies. Much appreciated.




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