Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets • Hacker News Board

Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#1

Post by pietroalbini » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets
blog.rust-lang.org

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#2

Post by dijit » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC).

32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones.

But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#3

Post by _bxg1 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

People have complained a lot about this decision by Apple, but I respect it. They're using their leverage over the ecosystem to cut off a huge piece of cruft from not only their own codebase, but many other codebases like Rust's that can now point to their decision in the face of criticism. And the only cost is that old binaries (not old code, old binaries) will no longer run without being rebuilt. Plus, this will probably never need to happen again because 64 bits can address 18 million terabytes of main memory.

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#4

Post by berkut » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

OS X Lion was the first version to use an x64 kernel, and there were definitely x86 (32-bit) versions of the OS and apps.

In particular, the quicktime runtime / codecs (until quicktime x) was only x86, and various VFX apps on OS X had to write RPC code to communicate with it as a 32-bit process from 64-bit land.

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#5

Post by vlovich123 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

32-bit Apple mobile devices stopped with the launch of iPhone 5s (~5 years ago). Apple dropped support for 32-bit only desktop CPUs ~7 years ago (Lion) and 32-bit only mobile CPUs ~2 years ago (iOS 11). Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps completely in iOS 11 and in macOS 10.15 (this latest release).

TLDR: No recent Apple OSes support running 32-bit at all.

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#6

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 app uses Rust, on both iOS and Android. (I work there but not on it.)

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#7

Post by kohtatsu » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #5

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

32-bit Apple mobile devices stopped with the launch of iPhone 5s (~5 years ago). Apple dropped support for 32-bit only desktop CPUs ~7 years ago (Lion) and 32-bit only mobile CPUs ~2 years ago (iOS 11). Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps completely in iOS 11 and in macOS 10.15 (this latest release). TLDR: No recent Apple OSes support running 32-bit at all.

FWIW the iPhone 5s was September 2013, i.e. 6.25 years ago.

I only mention it because the timing was a surprise to everyone in the industry.

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#8

Post by jbtule » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

Yeah there was one generation of Mac's that used the Intel Core Duo which 32bit only. They are long not supported. https://everymac.com/mac-answers/snow-leopard-mac-os-x-faq/m...

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#9

Post by oarsinsync » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #5

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

32-bit Apple mobile devices stopped with the launch of iPhone 5s (~5 years ago). Apple dropped support for 32-bit only desktop CPUs ~7 years ago (Lion) and 32-bit only mobile CPUs ~2 years ago (iOS 11). Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps completely in iOS 11 and in macOS 10.15 (this latest release). TLDR: No recent Apple OSes support running 32-bit at all.

> TLDR: No recent Apple OSes support running 32-bit at all.

macOS Mojave 10.14 (released 2018) supports running 32-bit apps.

iOS 10 (released 2016) supports running 32 bit apps.

I would agree that iOS 10 is not recent, in the context of the iOS timeline. I would disagree that macOS Mojave is not recent, given that Apple still has numerous show-stopper bugs in the upgrade process to Catalina.

Re: Rust – Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets

#10

Post by jbott » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #2

Seems fair. Dropping support doesn’t mean it won’t work anymore. Just that it’s not as tested (reading the RFC). 32bit MacOS was never used on x86 as far as I know. And even PPC 32bit was a very small number of machines a very long time ago. Not sure about 32bit iPads and iPhones. But, I’ve never seen a project using rust on iOS. Does anyone have an example of this?

PPC 32 bit is still used extensively in the embedded space. It's understandable that it's not the main target for newer languages as LLVM support seems to be sparse (and practically non-existent for some dialects such as Freescale PPC-VLE) but it would be great to enable safer embedded development.