Stefan Seefeld wrote:
But while there has been a time when it was common to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same machine, I believe this use-case is in sharp decline, as 64-bit platforms are now the norm (and wherever 32-bit apps are run, it's the only choice).
100% of Windows 64 users run both 32 and 64 applications on the same machine. But this doesn't matter. Having 32 and 64 bit static libraries in the same directory is not in any way connected with whether one runs 32 bit and 64 bit applications on the same machine, even if we posit that this is rare, which it's not. Similarly, users don't run debug and release versions of our software at the same time, yet we encode debug/release in the library name and allow both variants in the same directory. It's as simple as this, in Visual Studio you have one dropdown for Debug/Release, another for 32/64, and you reasonably expect both to be equally well supported.