Re: [RFC] Drop support for 32bit builds

On 19.06.25 18:55, Hans Henrik Bergan wrote:

On Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 18:24 Ben Ramsey <ramsey@php.net> wrote: 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

Smallest ramnode.com <http://ramnode.com> VPS has 512MB ram. I would run 32bit PHP on a 512mb ram VPS. I'm not longer a ramnode customer, but I used to be. I for one would be sad to see 32bit PHP go. I have done a quick test on current master with Symfony : Without OPCache x32: mem: 16777216b, t: 0.15017914772034s x64: mem: 23068672b, t: 0.072926998138428s With OPCache x32: mem: 4194304b, t: 0.01033878326416s x64: mem: 4194304b, t: 0.0080580711364746s As you can see, with opcache enabled it's taking the same amount of memory. (I don't know why ... did mostly the same setup as the configure-x32 GH action)

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