Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Drop support for 32bit builds

[Marc Bennewitz]

On 19.06.25 18:55, Hans Henrik Bergan wrote:

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

    > On Jun 19, 2025, at 11:08, Calvin Buckley <cal...@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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