Drop 32-bit Windows support
I sent the following email to ghc-devs@ and glasgow-haskell-users@ last week suggesting that we should officially drop 32-bit Windows support in GHC 8.12:
tl;dr. Unless someone speaks up, GHC will formally discontinue its (currently-broken) support for 32-bit Windows in 8.12.
Hi everyone,
As some have noticed, recent GHC releases' support for 32-bit Windows support can be generously described as "unreliable". This has been due to a combination of platform limitations, native toolchain bugs, and a general lack of capacity within the GHC community focusing on Windows support.
I won't summarise the concrete issues here (see #17961 (closed), and #17700 (closed) for the current state-of-play) but let it suffice to say that we are currently stuck due to a bug in GNU binutils. However, I was recently informed that Cygwin and msys have recently discontinued their support for 32-bit Windows. While GHC uses a toolchain from the mingw32-w64 project, it seems only a matter of time before 32-bit builds cease there as well (see [1] for a summary of the relationships between these projects).
Furthermore, Microsoft itself has said that 32-bit Windows 10 releases will cease later this year. All of this suggests to me that supporting 32-bit Windows in GHC will be, at best, an up-hill battle. Even worse, it is a battle with little to gained: essentially all Intel-based Windows systems today run on 64-bit-capable systems. I know of no compelling reasons why users would opt to use 32-bit Windows in 2020.
Consequently, I suggest that we should formally discontinue 32-bit Windows support in GHC 8.12. In my opinion, GHC's limited engineering capacity on Windows is better spent elsewhere.
However, if there are compelling reasons why some users still rely on 32-bit Windows support (despite it being largely unusable for the last two years), please do let me know. I have been consistently surprised by the number of users who have noted the absence of 32-bit Windows builds; I would love to know why they seem to be so popular.
So far there hasn't been any response so I think we should move ahead with this.