Can someone summarise why we should care about 32 bit sw other than old things that might not be ported?
And then knowing that if you drop 32bit then you can gain space on your silicon.
What irks me is that devs saw the first 64bit devices come out, and didn’t go “I should recompile my code”. Honestly the fact there are so many new apps made for pc that aren’t 64bit is mind blowing to me.
Assuming you mean Windows, there are still a nontrivial number of PCs in the wild that are running a 32-bit OS. It's not huge -- about 1.5% of gaming PCs according to the Steam survey, probably a bit higher for home and office computers -- but either way it's enough that building applications as 64-bit-only is problematic.
But more seriously: why ship 32-bit only software. 64bit has been supported by all cpus intel and amd have shipped for more than a decade now. I had a consumer 64bit Athlon in 2005/6 that I could afford on a student budget. Given the perpetually increasing cpu demands of modern games, that you'd throw away something in the order of 15-20% perf by not support 64bit just seems insane.
Seriously: make 64bit your primary target, and if that hurts 32bit perf, that's those user's problem: they chose not to buy a high perf system.
But why? The Cave was released in 2013. We're almost two decades into the 64bit transition.
Each and every version of macOS for the past 10 years has shipped with 4+ years old versions of OpenGL.
For example El Capitan (the last version without Metal) was released in 2015 and shipped with OpenGL 4.1 which was released in 2010.
I just wish Apple would include a free downloadable 32-bit image of macOS Mojave or a specific version that we can always run on top of Apple's Hypervisor framework that'll be maintained forever for use of these 32-bit software in the event we don't find a proper 64-bit version and we don't "violate their EULA" if we buy a new Mac that didn't come with Mojave.
I'm not saying Apple will do anything like this but it would be nice of them to do it.
Free copies of Snow Leopard would likely cost them a lot in fees to IBM
But we have a natural experiment of the opposite: Microsoft has bent over backwards to maintain back compatibility. And those old APIs have been the major sources of vulnerabilities, fragility, and maintenance cost. They do occasionally bite the bullet (e.g. old versions of Word are no longer readable) but they go out of their way not to.
I really don't like Windows for my own technical reasons but I have tremendous respect for the amount of effort MS has put in over the years on this front and I sympathize with the consequences.
Apple has a much smaller "surface" (both vulnerability attack surface as well as surface ear of their own code base) which makes many technical decisions much easier.
So either way means a choice; you can't say one is absolutely superior to the other.
However, Some fields still have some 32-bit based products (or frameworks) which would break on Catalina.
Why would someone use 32bit? There are closed-sourced products that never released as 64bit. for software developers that's quite rate but still for some fields there are no real alternatives for those products. so they should keep older versions or run VM.
Perhpas now they will have that, or other pieces of software will come and fill the void.
I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though, it will mean a lot more work for those devs – or a serious reduction in the amount of software that will work with it.
why? all Intel chips currently supports 32bit ISA. You can still have VMs to run 32bit. also IIRC, Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it with simple Docker container.
Absolutely true. I once had to set a client-server Windows-based CRM in a small company. The server had a native Linux version, the client app was windows-only. Client machines ran Windows. Users also wanted to work from home. For some reason (some kind of connection glitches or whatever, I can't remember already) I've chosen to install Xfree on the Ubuntu server (one of command-line-managed VirtualBox VMs on another Ubuntu server actually), set-up the app for direct client-server connection, let users connect to the Linux box over OpenVPN and run the Win32 app with Wine over SSH on their Windows machines :-)
I've fell in love with the X as I have managed to set this up (quite easily, BTW). I certainly don't want Linux to loose such a beautiful ability as it switches to Wayland (I don't worry much about Wine though, all the distributions but Ubuntu keep shipping multiarch libs and it works just fine but I won't update my Mac as it has just 128 GiBs SSD and I have no disk space to spare for a Windows VM).
More people have to suffer usually if software ends up long lived without being pushed to upgrade when there are newer technologies that improve the experience - it's a heavy price of others you're asking for a lot of times when choices have to be made between compatibility and improvements that often get discounted unreasonably.
I look at all of the Mac software I've lost and will lose to upgrades over the years, including the offline-only parts of my workflow that held back only myself, and weigh them against this bright new future of low-effort blown-up tablet apps on my desktop that they were sacrificed for. A heavy price certainly has been paid here.
Real world is not the web cocoon, even there, switching front-end every 2 years is not acceptable.
disclamer: I know that for a fact as I'm in the process of replacing a CNC control system with modern parts, trust me it's HARD.
It's crazy that we can't run old software on vastly more powerful hardware. Imagine if we suddenly couldn't read old books.
Computers are made up of many small parts the same with software, every component comes from different vendors and they are all working asynchrously to each other and adjusting to the changes around them every time they update or make a new component.
Each new change looks like a tiny leap-frogging, but if you don't update or rearchitechture for a long while it becomes an insurmountable to task to update because the whole world has moved away from under you. Not by monumental breaking changes but by thousands small changes that has added up.
Yep. I have a number of 32-bit programs that were never and will never be ported to 64 bits because the author has died, the company is out of business, or other reasons.
Now I will have to buy replacements for these programs just so I can run an OS that gets the latest security updates.
It can also affect hardware.
For example, I have two Apple AirMac routers that can only be configured with a version of Airport Utility that runs on old hardware. I'm lucky to have an old iLamp around that I can use when this is necessary, but when that dies, I have to throw away two perfectly good routers just because Apple chooses not to support them in the current version of Airport Utility.
As for StarCraft you can run it in VirtualBox, or perhaps even DOSBox with Windows95 might be enough.
Nevertheless I agree people should care about keeping old games playable - these are an important part of human cultural legacy, a fairly serious form of art, as are paintings, literature, etc.
[1] https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20762237268#...
Its also annoying for people with some commercial software. My dad uses an older nonsubscription version of photoshop and some desktop publishing software that I believe will be incompatible with Catalina
That's about the only reason to care as far as I can tell.
I was pretty surprised to see that relatively recent ports like Bioshock Infinite won't be getting a 64-bit update. We had 64-bit games back in 2005 starting with the original Far Cry, so I'm not sure how this could even be a problem nearly 15 years later.