Advantages of a 64 bit system

Question

From a developer perspective i am trying to understand , what is the selling point of a 64-bit system ?

I understand that more registers are at your disposal , more memory can be allocated to a process , but i cannot understand what makes a developer's life easier. Any examples ?

From a performance perspective are there any gains seen if a program is run on a 32bit vs 64 bit ?

Cheers!

EDIT : Thank you for all your replies. I see some conversations shooting towards end user experience , important as it may be.. I am looking more at any architectural benefits that you can squeeze out.

From what i understand , it looks like the optimizations are a lot at the compiler-assembler chain rather than a functionality which a programmer can call on ?

Answer 1

Sorry, I kept this a bit list style, and avoided not mentioning increased memory addressing and more which had already been mentioned.

a) You'll have double the amount of registers, actually giving you three times the amount of registers at you disposal. b) General purpose registers are increased from 32 to 64 bit, meaning processing of 64 bit integers (i.e.) will be faster. c) More efficient position independent code since data can now be referenced relative to the RIP register. d) No-execute bit making the system more tolerant towards buffer overflows.