I don't recall seeing this discussed and so am bringing it up now.
(If there was solid prior discussion that someone knows of.
Wider context is Perl's historically maintaining support for a wide variety of
hardware architectures and operating systems in modern versions.
Narrower context is Perl long being buildable for both 32-bit and 64-bit
hardware architectures, such that how you build it determines the "native" size
of an integer being 32 or 64 bits.
My question is, do we know if there is a significantly sized user base that both
continues to upgrade to newer Perl versions AND is running them on hardware that
is natively 32 bits for integers.
As far as I know, practically all hardware released for the last 15 years has
had 64-bit CPUs and hence most builds of Perl would have been 64 bits. (At
least all Macs were 64-bit from late 2006 or so.)
I suspect that if the ability to produce a 32-bit build of Perl was deprecated
this year and removed a few years later, it may make it significantly easier to
maintain the Perl core and ecosystem due to removing a whole dimension of
complexity.
Does this seem like a reasonable change in principle, or are there still good
reasons at this point to continue expressly supporting 32-bit builds indefinitely?
Thank you for your thoughts.
-- Darren Duncan
(If there was solid prior discussion that someone knows of.
Wider context is Perl's historically maintaining support for a wide variety of
hardware architectures and operating systems in modern versions.
Narrower context is Perl long being buildable for both 32-bit and 64-bit
hardware architectures, such that how you build it determines the "native" size
of an integer being 32 or 64 bits.
My question is, do we know if there is a significantly sized user base that both
continues to upgrade to newer Perl versions AND is running them on hardware that
is natively 32 bits for integers.
As far as I know, practically all hardware released for the last 15 years has
had 64-bit CPUs and hence most builds of Perl would have been 64 bits. (At
least all Macs were 64-bit from late 2006 or so.)
I suspect that if the ability to produce a 32-bit build of Perl was deprecated
this year and removed a few years later, it may make it significantly easier to
maintain the Perl core and ecosystem due to removing a whole dimension of
complexity.
Does this seem like a reasonable change in principle, or are there still good
reasons at this point to continue expressly supporting 32-bit builds indefinitely?
Thank you for your thoughts.
-- Darren Duncan