[bmacho]

> If the Operating System is proprietary then the target is not marked deprecated by the vendor. The icon means the OS is officially deprecated, such as macos/x86.

Not supporting proprietary OSes is a bummer. Especially if it is marked as deprecated since it is unlikely to change. People choosing Zig to anything choose their users to throw away their devices.

.. the number of hardware and software just keeps growing and growing endlessly, and the number of their combinations grows even faster. We probably need some more virtual machines as targets to cover them all.

[kristoff_it]

> People choosing Zig to anything choose their users to throw away their devices.

Apple is asking you to throw away your devices, not Zig. Getting proper CI coverage for supported versions of the OS is already pretty expensive and doing the same for unsupported systems is entirely unfeasible at this moment.

Don't buy Apple if you don't want to throw away functioning hardware.

[bmacho]

Yeah, sure. It is still a bummer when people that try actively to underpin the whole world tell you 'fuck you'.

Having 'we support proprietary systems until their makers support it' as a hard rule is unnecessary and harsh. It is a simple rule, but I don't think it is good. Why not choose the supported systems on individual merits, e.g. on usage statistics? I think for example the Linux kernel does that.

edit: I just continued the previous thought. If your reply means that you are open or likely to target deprecated systems in the future, that's much better!

[kubkon]

Hi, kubkon here, the author of Zig's MachO linker. I just wanted to explain our reasoning here a little bit. As you have hopefully noticed in the release notes, there are 5 core team members that are paid either full- or part-time for their work on Zig. That's not an awful lot, and as you can see in our latest roadmap for 0.12 release, we have quite a few challenging components to develop including functioning linkers for the most common platforms, and not only macOS/Apple. This makes it really tricky to justify spending a considerable amount of time trying to support an OS that was officially dropped by a vendor such as macOS/x86, or watchOS/arm32 (FYI, as a fun fact, arm32 is considered private as opposed to public by Apple according to comments and conditional includes in Apple's libc headers). That said, after 1.0/stable release of Zig, I would love to spend more time into adding backwards support for old Apple platforms in the MachO linker and Zig as a whole.

[kristoff_it]

> I just continued the previous thought. If your reply means that you are open or likely to target deprecated systems in the future, that's much better!

It would be nice to eventually provide support older systems but first we need to get to a point where doing so doesn't mean taking away resources from more worthy endeavors.

[jmull]

I think the “not” in there is a typo? It reads logically if you remove it.

So it’s not really zig deprecating 32-bit macos’s, but Apple, and there’s not a lot zig can do about that.