Re: [RFC] Drop support for 32bit builds

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.