On 2/27/12 5:58 PM, Ed Morley wrote:
> Option B: (my personal preference)
>
> * Switch off Nightly Win64 builds (at least for the short to medium term).
I have 4 concerns off the top of my head:
1) If we turn off Win64 builds now, how much extra effort will be
required later to get them working and shippable? And is that extra
delay (on top of all the existing ambiguity/delay/work) worth it? And
how about versus an Option C of getting Win64 builds/tests going in
inbound/try, such that it becomes more like a tier-1 platform?
2) Conversely, if there's a proposal to simply never ship Win64 in the
foreseeable future, that should be raised and decided before we spend a
lot of time in this thread. :) My understanding of the status quo is
that we're eventually going to ship it, but it's not a high priority or
on a specific schedule.
3) Competitive landscape. I would be be worried about further eroding
market/mindshare if competitive browsers are shipping 64-bit builds or
have a plan for doing so. [IE has a 64-bit version but defaults to 32,
what's the state of Chrome's and Opera's plans?] If people are under the
mistaken impression that the 64-bit builds are blazing fast, I'd really
love to use that little thread to help start unraveling the whole
"chrome is king" sweater (by fixing our 64 bit issues), and not just say
"wrong! those builds are terrible and slow!".
4) 64-bit everywhere? How long until the majority of our userbase is
64-bit capable, and supporting 32-bit code become a legacy headache?
Probably still a ways out, but the future seems clear enough to me --
eventually most platforms will be 64-bit. Linux seems to already be
there (distros are commonly shipping the 64-bit version, no?), and OS X
is almost there (istr an earlier thread about going 64-bit only once
10.5 support is dropped). I would assume the fraction of Windows users
with 64-bit capable systems is only going to grow. Not sure what the
outlook is for mobile.
I guess there's one other meta-issue that comes to mind... We generally
know that our Nightly population is quite often just not representative
of our general population (Farmville, anyone?). I don't want to ship
crap to our users, but it's also not clear to me that we would get a lot
of incremental value from moving some or all of them to 32bit builds.
Justin