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About the future of 32-bit

After #10666 (closed), it seems like the siege is closing day after day against our 32-bit build 😅.

32-bit lua-lgi was dropped some days ago by the MSYS2 guys: https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/commit/93f22f99e2471f54103ba6e285e2f1c86f7766f2#diff-6a773edb90ff26b85cc0c6742490a51aa43712a1077297f7cd622c73f8cb3060

This is making our x86 runner fail again:

error: target not found: mingw-w64-i686-lua51-lgi

/cc @Jehan @Wormnest @jernejs

I don't have the authority to talk about this (I am still researching the 32-bit issues in our tracker) and was planning to postpone this for after 3.0, but our I would like to point the following complications with the 32-bit build (not all of them have the same weight):

Maintenance drawbacks:

  • The 32-bit crossbuild requires non-binary parts of the x64 artifact to work. This little detail makes scripting a bit complicated, even this being now a custom GUI build.

  • Actually, we have two Creiter runners, one for each arch. Thi

  • If we don't want to bother MSYS contributors, we'll need to add more custom builds but when we fix a CI bug another 32-bit one appears. This can make some Windows contributors feeling exhausted by needing to go that far for 32-bit.

Consistency drawbacks:

  • The native x64 build can't be run when Restriction Policy is enabled on Windows because of 32-bit TWAIN plug-in binaries. This limits the user's security options

  • The above point is more imminent than it may seem. The MSIX package for ARM64, due to Microsoft limitations, willn't have the 32-bit TWAIN plug-in. This will make some (few) ARM users blame the store version

  • The 32-bit build suffers from specially inherent limitations, for example: it can't do simple actions like opening a "big" file. This makes GIMP appear somewhat "buggy".

Finally, I would like to point out that if we dropped the 32-bit build this would not be so damaging to the "userbase" as there is no alternative other than GIMP. Krita and paint.net have already dropped this architecture.

Of course, the ancient TWAIN plug-in will be mostly useless, but it's not like the plug-in was that reliable or popular.

Edited by Bruno