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Djarum posted:Well to play devils advocate here I think it was too early to kill 32-bit apps and more importantly I don’t think Apple realized how much 32-but software was still being used regularly and how much was not and likely never will be updated. It's more complicated than this. The main reason 32 bit is going away is that it's wiping away the last vestiges of the Classic to Mac OS X transition, Carbon. 32 bit x86 on the Mac still had active use of the Carbon APIs, and with the retirement of 32 bit executables, all of that API has gone away. From their perspective, that's a lot less testing and things to build against, and it is a LOT of cruft to be gone. There's also some other technical reasons. I think this is an excellent summary: https://pilky.me/apples-technology-transitions/ The last time we had a transition that broke stuff was in 10.7 when PowerPC went away, and before that 10.5 killed Classic. The first rumblings about 32 bit going away happened with 10.13 in 2017, but Apple didn't really get aggressive about warning people until the 2018 WWDC when 10.14 was announced and saying it would be the last version that would run 32 bit apps. If you were an active dev, you should have started your port at that time (and not like my devs, who ignored warnings and started it around the Catalina announcement and probably won't ship until March). Honestly, the Mac makes it very easy to have a 64 bit application, and one should have been cross-building IA64 for years. Fat binaries and the multiple ABI abilities of OS X makes this a lot easier, but I remember the day we dropped PowerPC support and I still had people trying to run things on G5s in 2012 call me and complain about it when they were three OS releases behind, and that's when Apple wasn't releasing yearly updates. I've lived through three major development transitions to account for (Classic to OS X, PowerPC to Intel, and now 32 to 64 bit) and they've all gone the same way. Users gripe and maybe wait a release, some software gets left behind, developers adapt. In two cases (PPC to Intel and ia32 to ia64) the software my company makes was ported at the absolute last minute because nobody ever heeds warnings, especially when those of us in QA/lower level development warn management and dev leads that "Hey, this is going to happen, it's bad, we should be ahead of it." When the first intel Macs were released, we should have started work on the Intel port, but it didn't get done in earnest until Lion was announced. By that time, Intel Macs had been on the market for three years! We had no one to blame but ourselves for not actually keeping up with the direction of the platform. TBH, it's been remarkable how long it's been since we last had a breaking transition. IA32 lasted on the Mac from 2006 to 2019, that's 13 years of general compatibility. Whether Apple dropped 32 bit this year or next year, we'd still end up with the same transition issues, which were exactly the same when PowerPC was dropped because people don't do things until they're forced. The exact same things were said back then, but devs and users adjusted and moved on. Does this gain anything directly for end users? Not really, ditching PowerPC apps didn't help end users either. But these kinds of transitions have been part and parcel of this platform for 25+ years since the first PowerPC Macs came out, and I'd expect one in another five to ten years. This is all aside from the bugginess of some Catalina apps, which is a separate issue not to be confused with the 32bitpocalypse.
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Jan 29, 2020 15:24
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Head Bee Guy posted:It doesn’t seem to be supported now, but anyone know if the 6800 series cards will Big Sur 11.1 already has the beginnings of Big Navi drivers, but they're in an early state (as in, not ready for prime time due to lack of HW acceleration). So I'm sure they'll be along in a few months. kefkafloyd fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Dec 31, 2020 |
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Dec 31, 2020 20:21
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