Hacker News Reader

Odd they still have i686-pc-windows-msvc as Tier 1 *. Even Microsoft doesn't have any supported 32bit Windows versions anymore, and C extension modules likely follow Linux (where Python doesn't have any no supported i686 triplets in any tier). It would be more modern to demote its Tier and promote aarch64 Windows or wasm32 instead to Tier 1.

* https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-1

View on HN

Python's tiering has to do with testability and availability thereof, not modernness. In the case of 32-bit Windows, the reason it's still testable is because Windows still ships a 32-bit userspace, even if Windows itself only supports x86-64.

(From personal experience, testing Windows aarch64 is a massive PITA, even on GitHub Actions, which all common sense would indicate should have the best aarch64 Windows CI runner story.)

That explains Tier-2 vs Tier-3. Not Tier-1 (where i686-windows is) vs Tier-2. Demanding every commit pass CI is a project decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com