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Re:Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows by bad_user on Thursday November 22, 2012 @07:22AM (#4818496)
I do not agree with your pessimistic argument regarding human nature.

A much bigger issue is that migrating a massive 32-bits application to 64-bits requires too much effort, because unfortunately the C and C++ specifications have left a ton of flexibility and room for platform-specific behavior.

For instance it's beyond me why those specs haven't mentioned details like concrete sizes for really basic datatypes, like Ints and Chars, especially since development in C and C++ tends to get into really low-level details and optimizations, which means you end up relying on Ints being 4 bytes in size (how could you not do that?). The truth really is that even seemingly unimportant details such as the size of Ints can mean the difference between a rock-solid 32-bits app and a 64-bits app that's broken almost beyond hope of ever being fixed.

If anything, this should be the number one reason for why we must stop using C and C++ for new application developments and even in systems/embedded programming we could do a lot better, as these languages are unsuitable for continued improvements due to Moore's law, impeding progress.

Can you see how this creates a vicious circle btw? So we can have affordable consumer workstations with more than 10 GB of RAM right now with multiple cores and all that, which makes client-side development in garbage-collected functional programming languages feasible, but we can't really go there because the 32-bits legacy is holding us back. That's funny and goes to show that sometimes Worse is Not Better.

Re:Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows by keeperofdakeys on Thursday November 22, 2012 @08:06AM (#4818604)
It isn't about human apathy, it's about not fixing what isn't broken. You sometimes come across stories of a windows 3.1 machine controlling a critical piece of machinery for a business.

As for C and C++, the bugs that prevent a program going from 32-bit to 64-bit is making assumptions about the sizes of datatypes, and these days is usually seen as bad programming. They are just tools though, and have their uses, even in a multi-threaded world.

Re:Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows by bad_user on Thursday November 22, 2012 @08:33AM (#4818676)
> these days is usually seen as bad programming

I've seen this repeatedly told again and again, however people saying that don't really know what they are talking about - it's extremely easy to make assumptions without even realizing you're making one, even if you could recite the whole spec of C and C++.

Even more, in C and C++ it is inevitable to make assumptions, even with eternal vigilance. I want you to point to a single reasonably big application that doesn't make such assumptions. And please don't point to one that works on both 32-bits and 64-bits, as in those cases the assumption about Ints simply evolved to: either 4 bytes or 8 bytes, with some awful code out in the wild that only works because of conditional compilation ... sometimes I wonder how software I rely upon works at all.

Re:Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows by keeperofdakeys on Thursday November 22, 2012 @10:22AM (#4819000)
Well the biggest thing you need to do is not use ints to store pointers, and use things like size_t, etc. This accounts for the majority of C programming bugs when moving from 32 bits to 64 bits.

As for making assumptions, this is only natural, and programmers should be aware of the basic differences so they can correct their assumptions.