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.

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