Re: [RFC] Drop support for 32bit builds
> On Jun 19, 2025, at 11:08, Calvin Buckley <calvin@cmpct.info> wrote:
>
> On Jun 19, 2025, at 11:08 AM, Marc Bennewitz <marc@mabe.berlin> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
> I think the biggest arguments against this would be:
>
> - embedded systems; think of PHP in use for i.e. router web UIs. While I
> suspect a lot of these are going to be i.e. AArch64/RV64 in the future,
> there might be a long tail of existing systems. Of course, how many
> would upgrade to PHP 9?
>
> - WebAssembly; I don't know how widespread the Memory64 proposal is yet.
> We're using WebAssembly in the docs pages for runnable examples.
>
> And some niche cases like i.e. iSH (which emulates x86-32 on iOS).
>
> The other options include making zend_long always 64-bit and accept the
> performance penalty for 32-bit, or making 32-bit best-effort rather than
> providing any guarantees.
Last night, I was giving some thought to reviving Andrea’s Big Integer RFC[^1]. This is something
I’ve wanted for a long time (especially for my ramsey/uuid library, among other things).
Andrea had a work-in-progress PR[^2]. I’m not sure the current state of it. It’s from 2014 and
was originally written for phpng. I had planned to start teasing out bits of it into a new branch
based on the current master branch to see how far I could get with it. I wouldn’t mind some help
with that, if anyone’s interested. :-)
If we are able to finish what Andrea started, then we would not need to drop support for 32bit
builds.
Cheers,
Ben
[^1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/bigint
[^2]: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/876
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