Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Good-bye to 32 bit apps?

We currently compile FDS and Smokeview for MS Windows, Linux, and Apple OS X. We release both a 32 bit and 64 bit version of each program for each OS. Maintaining the 32 bit apps is becoming increasingly troublesome, and we anticipate that in the coming year we will drop support for 32 bit operating systems. I suspect that this will not be an issue for Linux and OS X users, but we do not know about Windows. MS no longer supports Windows XP, the last OS to come with 32 bit as the default, but there might still be a lot of these machines around. So this is an opportunity for any and all 32 bit users to make their case for us to continue supporting 32 bit. If we do not see a significant call for keeping 32 bit, we will drop it to simplify our compilation and release activities.