- Jane Street packages: dropping support for 32-bit
- Tests don't work on `4.11.0+32bit` · Issue #150 · anmonteiro/ocaml-h2 · GitHub
- Tezos is not expected to work on 32bits at all.
- Cross compiling from to 32bits can only be made from a 32bits platform
It seems clear to me that your average package is not tested on 32bits platforms. Also as someone who did work on testing a bunch of stuff for armv7, even if stuff builds it doesn’t actually is expected to work.
i386 is available on any CI, so I fail to see how 32-bit hardware is lacking for testing. And most arm64 platforms you could use aarch32 mode, but that’s not gonna work forever as new arm64 platforms don’t even contain a 32bits mode including the latest ARM and Apple chips.
As you mentioned, JSOO is commonly used, but an important detail is that it is not a 32bits platforms in the same way as native, actually the ints are 32bits, so it’s not 2 platforms, is closer to 3, and here I’m proposing to reduce to 2.
I personally believe that 64bits and 32bits OCaml should have 32bits unboxed ints, by default but that is probably not happening as it would be a big breaking change.
Yes I understand that, a small difference is how it fits in the ecosystem, which is closer to how floats and float array work then to how unboxed types are used. But I believe the runtime change to be the same.