PuTTY wish win64-binaries

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summary: Provide 64-bit Windows executables
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: win64
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
fixed-in: 5985bb7ea0afd73407bc894fd32633a4f0cadad4 2017-01-22 (0.68)

For a long time, while it's been more or less possible to build PuTTY as a 64-bit Windows executable, we haven't been doing so ourselves.

For a long time we didn't bother since there didn't seem to be any advantages that would outweigh the faff and the resulting confusion. Now we do plan to provide native 64-bit executables, for a couple of reasons:

As of 84cd309295c12e7a8a3a7bc37280f8d7859b4a8b, our cryptographic code can now take advantage of the 64-bit operations to improve performance.
PuTTY can use external DLLs (for instance for Kerberos/GSSAPI); with the ubiquity of 64-bit machines these days, these may only be available in 64-bit versions, so a 64-bit PuTTY is needed for compatibility. (For the same reason, we will need to continue to provide 32-bit binaries, and so will need to mitigate the resulting confusion about which one to download from our website.)

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2021-07-03 11:50:19 +0100)