Re: [PHP-DEV] Year 2038 issue

[Marc Bennewitz]

On 16.06.25 19:01, Yogarine wrote:

Hi all,

On 16 Jun 2025, at 17:24, Rob Landers<rob@bottled.codes> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025, at 16:54, Alexandru Pătrănescu wrote:

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 4:03 PM Marc Bennewitz<marc@mabe.berlin> wrote:
Hi all,

It's 12.5 years only until the timestamps in PHP on 32bit will not work
as expected anymore.


Hi,

I think that maybe we can already deprecate supporting 32 bit builds.
And, maybe with PHP 9, or PHP 10, or with a future version that might exist in 
about 6/7 years, completely drop 32 bits support.

As far as I checked a bit, all major OSs where PHP could run already dropped or 
will drop support for 32 bits builds.
I expect that at some point even the linux kernel will drop support.

The impacted runtimes will probably be very low.

--
Alex

100% agree. We are already running out of space on some bitmasks (there are a 
couple with exactly one bit left, or even none in the case of GC flags) for 32 
bit support.

— Rob

I'm reminded of a recent comment by Derick. He mentioned that usually if a 
function can't be provided on a specific platform or SAPI, that function is 
disabled for that environment specifically. This allows for a polyfill to 
provide an alternative implementation. (e.g. `getallheaders()`)

Considering 32-bit builds will not be able to reliable provide the `date()` 
function at some point, what if we deprecate, and later disable, these integer 
date functions on 32-bit builds specifically? This would have 0 impact for 
64-bit users and provide a means for users on legacy or embedded systems to use 
an alternative implementation (that perhaps uses a custom Unix epoch, or 
numeric strings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

It's a long list of date functions already (see my first mail) and on looking deeper into detail it's not limited to the date extension. Same issues happen on a wide range of standard functions like "filemtime" or "opcache_get_status". Specifically everywhere where a timestamp is involved. Not even talking about the already known behavior differences of functions like "crc32".

Alwin

OpenPGP_0x3936ABF753BC88CE.asc
Description: OpenPGP public key

OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature