Haiku OS Begins Working On 32/64-bit Hybrid Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Haiku OS Begins Working On 32/64-bit Hybrid Support

Haiku OS developers have begun working on the functionality to allow 32-bit applications to run on a 64-bit Haiku OS system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Haiku-OS-32-64-Bit-Hybrid

[cb88]

Phoronix: Haiku OS Begins Working On 32/64-bit Hybrid Support

Haiku OS developers have begun working on the functionality to allow 32-bit applications to run on a 64-bit Haiku OS system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-64-Bit-Hybrid

32bit legacy apps on 64bit haiku is going to be a Huge thing as all development can focus more on the single way of running Haiku and making that better... I doubt they will drop 32bit images but I imagine 64/32bit hybrid will become standard.

[perpetually high]

Browsing phoronix on Haiku in a VM, it's kinda peaceful.

[tzui]

An news about Beta1? The last article suggested it would be a matter of just a few days. This was some months ago now.

[nanonyme]

32bit legacy apps on 64bit haiku is going to be a Huge thing as all development can focus more on the single way of running Haiku and making that better... I doubt they will drop 32bit images but I imagine 64/32bit hybrid will become standard.

You mean similarly to how hybrid on Windows led into people never migrating to 64bit and on Linux into a mess where you need to hunt down missing 32bit packages for installation because your distro will be 64-bit only for space reasons? Also won't run on 32bit processors anyway so you either need separate 32-bit-only flavour or drop support for a hardware class. I wouldn't say hybrid is all in all a must-have feature

[Chewi]

I don't even know why Haiku would need this. It's generally only needed for proprietary software. What proprietary software is there for Haiku other than perhaps some super ancient BeOS stuff?

[mike44]

Simply drop 32bit support like Ubuntu etc. did.

[dragorth]

You mean similarly to how hybrid on Windows led into people never migrating to 64bit and on Linux into a mess where you need to hunt down missing 32bit packages for installation because your distro will be 64-bit only for space reasons? Also won't run on 32bit processors anyway so you either need separate 32-bit-only flavour or drop support for a hardware class. I wouldn't say hybrid is all in all a must-have feature

It depends on how it is implemented. FatELF and OSX's equivelent put both 32bit and 64bit code in the same executable, so that one file works everywhere. It worked beautifully for OSX during their many transitions, and I always thought it was a shame FatELF was not adopted by the Linux crowd.

[starshipeleven]

Simply drop 32bit support like Ubuntu etc. did.

They dropped 32bit iso images, multiarch (running 32bit applications in a 64bit system) is still there.

[starshipeleven]

It depends on how it is implemented. FatELF and OSX's equivelent put both 32bit and 64bit code in the same executable, so that one file works everywhere. It worked beautifully for OSX during their many transitions, and I always thought it was a shame FatELF was not adopted by the Linux crowd.

OSX packages are self-contained afaik (i.e they ship all their libraries) so they can have binaries and libraries for all architectures inside. Same for Android applications afaik.

Linux applications would still need external multiarch libraries to work even if packaged as FatELF, defying the point.

The most similar thing to OSX or Android packaging is Flatpack or Snap, FatELF is quite frankly not that useful for modern applications that need large amounts of libraries.