After a long time I finally figured out how to get a working 64 bit build of MeshCAM. It ended up being a random setting I put in Visual Studio years ago that prevented the build from succeeding until now. I now have debug and release builds of MeshCAM 64 and they seem to work very well including the ability to use tons of memory:
That’s a peak usage of 5 GB of memory without a crash. The model used in that test was a 12 foot diameter sphere machined with a 2mm stepover at a .001” tolerance.
When packed into the existing installer the 64 bit build only adds about 3MB to the file size. That’s pretty insignificant so I’m going to stay with a single installer for both 32 and 64 bit builds. 64 bit users will be able to pick which version to use while 32 bit users will automatically be given that version.
To get this build working I had to make hundreds of little changes so this build officially marks the start of MeshCAM V5 development. It won’t be done anytime soon but I will try to get some betas flowing over the next couple of months.