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Comment by luriel | Hacker News Reader

gccgo is better on 32bit systems: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/qxlxu5RZAl0/NS71...

Note that work on the garbage collector is ongoing post-Go1, a faster parallel GC is in process being merged: http://codereview.appspot.com/5279048/

But ultimately 32bit systems don't seem to be a big issue for Google or anyone else using Go in production (and there are quite a few big organizations using it: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go ).

Most people moved to 64bits a while ago so the amount of attention the 32bit port gets will never be the same.

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You know, that kind of sucks ... there are many machines around that are still on 32 bits.

I keep my own Ubuntu laptop (dual-boots to Windows) on 32-bit builds (both Linux and Windows), simply because I have less problems that way (mostly with hardware drivers, but also with software). I keep the Amazon EC2 instances I maintain on 32-bit images, simply because they are cheaper. My Android phone is also 32-bit and will be so for a long time. My other phone, an older iPhone 3GS, is also 32-bit. My servers, prior to Amazon EC2, built with ARM processors, were also 32-bit.

And when I was playing with MongoDB, do you know what I did when I discovered that the 32-bit build was basically unusable? I ditched it and never looked back.

I've been exclusively using 64 bit computers and operating systems, both Windows and Linux, for about 7 years now, never had the reported driver problems, well, never had any issue, really.

For me at least, 32 bit is only important for ARM. On the other hand the issue is very much blown out of proportion, most people haven't seen it, even if they run 32 bit servers. Most usual servers written in Go, like web servers, use very little memory. I process 4k requests per second using 7MB of resident memory. There are many memory intensive applications, but you usually don't run those on 32 bit.

I do wish the desktop world would just move wholesale to 64 bit, but do note that Ubuntu still marks the 32 bit install the "recommended" one, so I would guess there must be some sort of problems that are lingering in the 64 bit versions. Maybe just flash support or something like that?

I don't think there are problems with 64 bit versions, but many computers are still 32 bits. The PC I use right now is 32 bits and I don't feel the urge to buy a new one. So I suppose 32 bit machines will stay around for another decade or so.

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