kencu wrote:
One day (two, three, four years from now?) 32bit software will no longer function on macOS. Hopefully by then the slirp networking and JIT will be all 64 bit and we won't even talk about 32bit any longer!
According to this year's WWDC, some 32-bit interfaces to system-level functions are going away this fall. 32-bit support for MachO binaries is supposed to be gone fall of 2019.
Of course, this doesn't mean everything will stop working; likely it will just begin with Apple no longer providing build support in XCode, and new APIs will not include 32-bit code. But I'd guess that yes, by three or four years from now, 32-bit x86 code will no longer run natively on OS X. We may need an OS X version of WINE or some sort of a dynarec shim to run 32-bit code under 10.17.
It makes sense to me for the 32-bit to stay the default build under MacPorts until it no longer works, as there's still work being done to get everything functional in 64-bit land.
But I'm not as bleak on this front as I was a year ago; SheepShaver has come a long way and now runs with almost perfect feature parity in 64-bit; this means that we still have the knowledge and skill to make the same changes to BII, if we also have the desire.