[concatime]

Games. Seriously. You have a lot of old (even new) games that depend on 32-bit binaries/libraries. And that’s why the recent “clash” between Canonical’s Ubuntu and Valve’s Steam[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698

[pier25]

Apple doesn't care much about games on macOS.

Each and every version of macOS for the past 10 years has shipped with 4+ years old versions of OpenGL.

For example El Capitan (the last version without Metal) was released in 2015 and shipped with OpenGL 4.1 which was released in 2010.

[dpezet]

Apple flagged OpenGL as deprecated in 10.14 so they have plans to drop it altogether.

[bangonkeyboard]

In the process of deprecation they broke it, for old time's sake: https://twitter.com/icculus/status/1054634481812992000

[SomeOldThrow]

That’s what windows is for—they’ve made the choice to emphasize legacy support over deprecation.

[hrktb]

can’t old games just be emulated or containerized ?

[ori_b]

Not if the OS doesn't support 32 bit processes. Containers are fancy chroots, not simple VMs.

[duskwuff]

Containerizing / emulating OpenGL libraries (especially proprietary vendor drivers, like nVidia's) is difficult.

[pvg]

A lot of these games aren't that old.

[masklinn]

Yup, for instance The Cave can't be run on iOS anymore, because it was developed as a 32b application. It's just one of a thousand.

[olliej]

It’s not just “iOS”: the modern (the last few years I think) A-series chips do not have any support for 32bit arm, they are 64bit only.

[saagarjha]

Surely only the A11 and above?

[olliej]

Honestly I can’t recall which gen dropped it, but presumably the moment they reached their EoL for the last non-64 bit device they had no reason to maintain the development cost of having a 32bit OS, maintaining support for communication between 32 and 64bit apps, nor the cost to users (doubling the size of the resident system memory, confusion of some apps running on some device but not others, etc).

And then knowing that if you drop 32bit then you can gain space on your silicon.

What irks me is that devs saw the first 64bit devices come out, and didn’t go “I should recompile my code”. Honestly the fact there are so many new apps made for pc that aren’t 64bit is mind blowing to me.

[dmix]

> because it was developed as a 32b application

But why? The Cave was released in 2013. We're almost two decades into the 64bit transition.

[ori_b]

Why did the game need to pay the performance penalty for going 64 bit if it wasn't going to address more than 2G of memory?

[megablast]

Why would windows 64 bit transition matter to an iOS app?

[cameldrv]

The iPhone 5S was the first to support 64 bit in late 2013.

[Wowfunhappy]

Also, games that work with Wine!