LOL I had completely glossed over and missed the the whinging about I cannot deal with getting 64 bit updates to apps or replacing them in the future.... so I will replace ALL the Mac apps and move to Windows
Preach. During Keynotes, Apple always addresses fragmentation. Yes, part of it is snark, but it's also an important business advantage.
(I love using imagery that is not applicable.... )
I did not know that, thanks. It's like when they reveal the stats on which smartphones are responsible for most of the photos on the internet, or which Apps Store provides the opportunity for their developers to make money.
VMs or a cheap bootable external drive. If their computer is new enough to run High Sierras (less than 10 years old), it is new enough to have TB1 at the very least and boot from a drive running all the legacy software they might need, when needed. They get the best of both worlds for a $30 drive.
They have a good 3 to 5 years to update those "mission critical" applications.... which should be more than enough time.
I think the complaint is that you'll be artificially prevented from reinstalling the old, 32-bit compatible, OS on your existing device.
There are plenty benefits that the move will or could allow, some of which Apple alone is uniquely positioned to benefit; from rewriting their frameworks in Swift and the performance gains involved in that; further unification of iOS and macOS frameworks that can be done by getting rid of the legacy runtime 32 bit Mac apps require; removing entire classes of bugs that Swift does not even make possible compared to, say, Objective-C or C; Apple could use future chips that have only 64 bit instruction sets (getting rid of the 32 bit portion would bring performance and energy use benefits)...
Yes, understand. But that only comes into play IF a 32-bit app is running. Folks that need to run 32-bit apps aren't going to be concerned with register usage and its implications.
In general yes, but Carbon and other 32-bit libraries are loaded on demand, so if they aren't called, they aren't loaded and there is no impact. Moreover, macOS memory management will and can remove code ( like frameworks ) from memory that isn't being used in order to prevent any performance issues. Your description sounds like OS behavior 40 years ago when we had fixed app partitions and no dynamic memory manager.
Good point in general but in this particular case with dynamic libraries the issue is minuscule to non-existent.
Windows can run 32bit apps just fine thanks to WoW64The move is so apps can access over 4Gig, where it be now, or in the future...
Why didn't we chuck this much fury when we moved from 32 to 64 bits with Windows? Its a bigger market share
Good point. The fact Apple has not revealed the how and why for the change suggests plans are afoot that depend on 32-bit removal.
Disagree slightly. Once the 32-bit phase-out warnings start, the subsequent user feedback might persuade Apple to change their plans slightly. However, I don't see that being "emulation"( i.e. a la Rosetta as we had on the PowerPC to Intel transition ) because most emulations are going to be more work for Apple than simply leaving 32-bit alone. But, as you point out, Apple hasn't fully disclosed the details, so we await them.
A developer can already make the choice to go with Cocoa and 64-bit if they need to access ( or malloc() ) several gigs of memory. Addressability could be a concern but with base/displacement addressing it would be rare for code to be unreachable and beyond 4GB. Clearly 64-bit addressing is beneficial in some scenarios but my guess is Apple's move is aimed at their own strategic moves and its primary purpose is not to benefit developers.
Precisely.
The space is negligible ( e.g. 27 MB disk space for the entire Carbon framework )
Assuming this is true on a modern Intel CPU, my own timings suggest the differences( which are hard to measure because it requires a lot of decimal places to find the difference ) are infinitesimal, measured in fractions of microseconds. Plus, as noted by others, it's the user's choice to run 32-bit and take the "hit".
Yep. Actually, Apple has been telling developers for almost a decade ( more or less the time they switched to Intel ) to switch to 64-bit and Cocoa. In defense of developers, Apple waffled on whether to implement a 64-bit Carbon, so many developers weren't quick to make the switch. Of course, upgrading your app from Carbon to Cocoa is non-trivial to say the least( most code needs to be re-written - particularly the UI ). There is no doubt in my mind Apple gave me and other developers more than adequate notice of Carbon's potential demise.
Seoras is blissfully unaware that this is a macOS thread not iOS.