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Postings from August 2023
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 DuncanThread Next