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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

""and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices""

Nice. So discrimination of poor users who are running "retro" machines because that is the best they can afford or acquire.

I knew of at least two devs who are stuck with older 32 bit machines as that is what they can afford/obtain. I even offered to ship them a spare laptop with a newer CPU and they said thanks but import duties in their country would be unaffordable. Thankfully they are also tinkering with 9front which has little to no issues with portability and still supports 32 bit.

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Looking at the list of affected architectures: Alpha (alpha), Motorola 680x0 (m68k), PA-RISC (hppa), and SuperH (sh4) I think these are much much more likely to be run by enthusiasts than someone needing an affordable computer.

No one is using an Alpha, Motorola 680x0, PA-RISC, or SuperH computer because that's the only thing they can afford. Rust supports 32bit x86.

The last 32bit laptop CPU was produced nearly 20 years ago.

Further, there are still several LTS linux distros (including the likes of Ubuntu and Debian) which don't have the rust requirement and won't until the next LTS. 24.04 is supported until 2029. Meaning you are talking about a 25 year old CPU at that point.

And even if you continue to need support. Debian based distros aren't the only ones on the plant. You can pick something else if it really matters.

> The last 32bit laptop CPU was produced nearly 20 years ago.

15 years max; I can easily find documentation of Intel shipping Atom chips without 64-bit support in 2010, though I haven't found a good citation for when exactly that ended.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/bonnel...

Looks like it was ultimately phased out in 2011.

It was only the first atom uarch that was 32. The next uarch (Saltwell) was 64.

You seem to be involved with 9front.

Are you trying to suggest there is a nontrivial community of people who cannot afford modern 64-bit Linux platforms, and opt for 9front on some ancient 32-bit hardware instead? Where are they coming from? Don't get me wrong, I love the 9 as much as the next guy, but you seem to paint it as some kind of affordability frontier...

> Where are they coming from?

One is in lives in Brazil and I think the other lives in the Middle East. They both have old second hand 32 bit laptops from the 00's.

> but you seem to paint it as some kind of affordability frontier...

Yes because there are people still using old hardware because they have no choice. Also, whats the problem with supporting old architectures? Plan 9 solved the portability problem and a prominent user recently ported it to cheap MIPS routers so we can run Plan 9 on cheap second hand network hardware. We have the tool chain support so we use it.

And believe me, I understand a raspberry pi or whatever is much faster and uses less power but I would rather we reduce e-waste where possible. I still run old 32 bit systems because they work and I have them.

> whats the problem with supporting old architectures?

It's not free, it's not easy, and it introduces hard to test and rarely run code paths that may or may not have problems on the target architecture.

I think there's a pretty strong argument for running hardware produced in the last 10 years for the next 10 or 20 years. However, I think it should be recognized that there was massive advances in compute power from 2000 to 2010 that didn't happen from 2010 to 2025.

A Core 2 Quad (produced in 2010) has ~ 1/2 the performance of the N150 (1/4 the single core performance of the latest AMD 9950).

Meanwhile a Pentium 3 from 2000 has roughly 1/10th the performance of the same Core 2 Quad.

There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010. Even the instruction set has basically become static at this point. AVX isn't that different from SSE and there's really not a whole bunch of new instructions since the x64 update.

> There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010.

I have stopped replacing machines (and smartphones) because they became outdated: the vast majority of compile tasks is finished in a fraction of a second, applications basically load instantly from SSD, and I never run out of RAM. The main limiting factor in my day-to-day use is network latency - and nothing's going to solve that.

My main machine is a Ryzen 9 3900X with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. And honestly? It's probably overkill. It's on the replacement list due to physical issues - not because I believe I'll significantly benefit from the performance improvements of a current-gen replacement. I'm hoping it'll last until AM6 comes around!

Every task is either "basically instantly", "finishes in a sip of coffee", or "slow enough for a pee break / email response / lunch break". Computers aren't improving enough to make my tasks upgrade to a faster category, so why bother?

> It's not free, it's not easy, and it introduces hard to test and rarely run code paths that may or may not have problems on the target architecture.

If your platform is designed properly it isn't much of an issue. This was bought up at a recent 9front hackathon and the lead dev stated that there is no reason to drop 386 or arm32. In fact, he said they are great test beds for shaking out cross platform bugs and tests all changes on 32 bit before committing.

Also, performance means nothing if the hardware is already there and capable of the job at hand.

We're basically at a point where running those older machines is more expensive, once you factor in power use.

Even then, people using ancient fifth-hand machines are almost certainly still going to run x86 - which means they'll have no trouble running Rust as 32-bit x86 is a supported target. Their bigger issue is going to be plain old C apps dropping 32-bit support!

"Retro" in this case genuinely means "horribly outdated". We're talking about systems with CPUs in the hundreds of MHz with probably fewer than a gigabyte in memory. You might do some basic word processing using Windows 95, but running anything even remotely resembling a modern OS is completely impossible. And considering their age and rarity, I'd be very impressed if anyone in a poor country managed to get their hands on it.

Rust works fine on 32 bit, (and 16 bit) that’s not what they mean…

Rust even works on 8-bit via the LLVM-MOS backend for MOS 6502 :)

Poor people aren’t running exotic hardware.

Agree, using these architectures isnt related to one's finances and unaffordability of hardware. Using obscure hardware like this for hobbyist reasons is a privilege, and one that rarely demands the latest upstream for everything at that.

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