Hi everyone, On 19.06.25 16:08, Marc Bennewitz wrote:
I’m writing to let you know that I’ve decided not to move forward with the RFC to drop 32-bit support - at least for now.Hi,During the discussion about the year 2038 issue it turned out that maybe it's time to drop support for 32-bit of PHP completely.Based on that I have created an RFC to deprecate 32-bit build in 8.next and drop support for it in 9.RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/drop_32bit_support
While there are clear problems with continuing to support 32-bit PHP builds, such as:
* additional complexity for the language itself and for library maintainers * Y2038 problem due to 32-bit integers used for Unix timestamps * File size limitations * Memory usage limitations * Issues with functions like |crc32|, |ip2long|, and |long2ip| returning negative valuesthere are still some valid use cases that currently don’t have ready-to-use alternatives.
The most significant of these identified is WebAssembly, which is actively used on for the PHP documentation and 3v4l.org. Although 64-bit WebAssembly support is nearly available in all major browsers, it’s still relatively new and not yet fully supported everywhere (Safari). Additionally, adopting 64-bit WebAssembly will require some effort from the affected projects.
Other use cases are more on the edge, like slightly older routers, embedded systems, X86-32 emulators and others, but the listed drawbacks may outweigh the benefits of these niche cases.
One argument I don’t consider strong is running 32bit builds of PHP on already supporting 64bit environments to save memory. While it's true, that 32-bit builds consumes less memory - it's actually not that much and it comes with a cost of being ~2.5 times slower.
X64 X32 % time: 0.005423069s 0.014256954s 262% mem: 1127808b 914064b 81% memReal: 4194304b 4194304b 100% peak: 1128696b 914888b 81% peakReal: 4194304b 4194304b 100%That said, once WebAssembly has been fully adopted, I'll most likely revisit this RFC.
In the meantime, there are two possibilities to reduce the issues of 32-bit builds, though both would increase the complexity of PHP internals.
* consistent 64-bit integers on all platforms [1] * native big integer support [2][3] [1] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/19079 (Draft) [2] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/bigint (Withdrawn) [3] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/876 (Closed)
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