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Comment by sunyc | Hacker News Reader

to go back to 32 bit hardware, you will be running very old machines that you can buy off ebay for <200$ and the power cost offset the new hardware cost in several months.

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Running a 32-bit operating system on 64-bit hardware is still pretty common. And this problem afflicts ARM as well.

This is really disappointing. I was hoping to do some stuff with Go on ARM, but it looks like they are not too concerned about this bug.

I would run a 32-bit OS (even if the hardware supported 64-bit) if I wanted to squeeze every last bit of usable memory out of a VPS.

This sounds like precisely the use-case for x32: Running userland programs that only use 32-bit pointers on x86-64 bit hardware in 64-bit mode; you only get to address 4GB of RAM, but your pointers fit two to a register and you have all the x86-64 registers, opcodes, and special hardware.

Sadly, it isn't here yet.

https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI

(To forestall the obvious objection: No, there's no way Torvalds will allow this to re-introduce the 2038 Problem into a new ABI. None.)

x32 has been accepted(and merged) for Linux 3.4. Kernel support is here, now it's userspace's turn.

This is what I thought. Go is primarily targeted at server-side applications, which are almost exclusively running on 64bit hardware/OS. Memory is so cheap now that it's silly not to have more than 16GB plugged in the chasis.

Then I realized there are many small VPS/EC2 instances with <1GB memory (I have two right now running on 64bit) and there are people who try to squeeze every last bit out of them by going 32bit...

I addition to arm and 32bit OSs, you're going to run into a lot of 32 bit hardware if you try to distribute a program written in Go to the masses (or at all really). I'm using some now.

Yeah, who's ever heard of those ARM things?

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