3 ms·
Why the in actual hell did we have to kill 32 bit support? Just seems ridiculous to break that sort of backwards compatibility
by exabrial 3y ago
Why the in actual hell did we have to kill 32 bit support?
Just seems ridiculous to break that sort of backwards compatibility
- lxgr 3y agoNot having to ship all libraries, first, and third party applications in effectively three versions (x86-64, amd64, arm64) saves significant disk space. A mixed 32 and 64 bit environment also means having many libraries paged into memory twice, and Apple isn't exactly known for being too generous on their RAM specs.
- eviks 3y agoCan save disk space by making the components optional
- lxgr 3y agoThe OS volume on macOS is read-only these days, and due to how universal binaries are implemented, just putting a 32-bit version somewhere else would probably not work without a major redesign (in addition to making them more vulnerable to tampering compared to the read-only volume).
- eviks 3y agoIt's read-only for the user, not for the system (after all, OS can update itself)
- mrpippy 3y agoKilling i386 support allowed: - dropping the “legacy” ObjC runtime, which lacked many features of the “modern” runtime that all other Apple platforms use. In particular, Swift couldn’t be used in system frameworks as long as the legacy runtime was still around. - dropping the Carbon APIs, which were an entire alternate API surface only usable by 32-bit apps. Lots of old, obsolete stuff here that very few apps were using: QuickDraw, QuickTime, HIToolbox, Font Manager, etc. - Disk space savings from not having to ship i386 slices