It doesn't matter why they decided to. They did. We all know better, we can all point fingers until we are blue in the face, but that doesn't change that people will lose access to software that they purchased.

> except in a well-contained module?

This is probably one of the best reasons. Game developers aren't entirely to blame here, middleware developers seem to be sticking to 32bit like balsamic glazing. Even if you could pry their cold dead hands off their archaic architecture, they'd probably make you pay full price for the 64bit upgrade.

As for DAWs? Think about all the the VST plugins out there. Most of which probably aren't maintained and only exist as zip files on the artist's dropbox.

Dropping 32bit is aspirationally sound. It's grossly inconsiderate of the very most obvious aspects of reality.

I think that's reasonable if we were talking about a tighter time-scale, but we're talking about at least 13 years since it's been 100% obvious that macOS would become 64-bit.

Yeah, but 64 bit doesn't give your users anything usually, so it's a tax that is more of a drain on smaller software shops. Especially consider that lots of programs and especially games have a spike of sales when new and then sales decline to nothing. There may not be new versions, ever. So going back and updating them is pure loss for the developers.

This is one reason why ecosystems like Java are so valuable! The 64 bit transition was so easy for it because of the common insistence on "pure Java" for portability. Combined with pointer compression 64 bit was hardly noticed.

You're right, but here we are anyway. Reality is always absurd.

To make the counterpoint: if it's not forced, apparently no amount of time is enough to convince people to change the code.

Forcing it is a net-good perhaps?

Because, among many other reasons, game developers work 60 and 80 hour workweeks, and have to deliver a project that takes 3 years in 6 months.

A lot of apps over the years have exploited the fact that kernels used to sit above the 2GB address space boundary to encode data into the high bit.