Comment by gdxhyrd
6 years ago
We are not just talking about arch/system ABIs but language/library ABIs.
In any case, 14 years is definitely a very short time for arch/system ABI support, specially compared to Linux or Windows which will basically never kill x86 ABI support.
Apple has just killed thousands of apps and games that people are using.
> which will basically never kill x86 ABI support
Ubuntu decided to drop i386 support since 19.10, for one. Though, x86_64 kernel still supports running 32-bit software and multilib support is there. The kernel is unlikely to drop support for the architecture, but if the distributions stop including it it will die off at some point.
In principle yeah Win32 ABI is still supported. In practice that has become untenable, so for old enough software they just run it in a Windows XP virtual machine instead.