Dropping 32-bit support (was Branches)

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Paul,

On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, Paul Hohensee wrote:

> Imo, it's very unlikely that 64-bit build footprint will ever be an
> issue, and 32-bit build footprint would be an issue on memory-limited
> devices, of which there are none that run OSX.  The real utility of
> 32-bit is compatibility.

Compatibility is a big issue (see e.g. Apple's support for
Quicktime4Java), but footprint is definitely also an issue.

For example, we are running a few data-intensive tasks on a machine with
128G RAM and manage to run out of memory (we are managing terabytes of
data, one microscope we use can produce >1TB data in less than 2 hours).

Now, a couple of these tasks have been streamlined to be able to page to
disk so they run on normal computers (our standard desktops do not have
128G RAM, but rather 2-4), but the fewer bytes we require to be in RAM per
dataset, the fewer page accesses we have, the faster the application runs.

> I'd just go with universal binaries and not bother with 32/64 options.

That would be the preferable solution for us, too.

Thank you,
Johannes