this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Whereas your argument seems to be to have a special C variant for 32bit Linux - there's no reason to have a special time64_t anywhere else.
Yeah, so what will breaking the ABI do? Break it a bit more?
That's what MUSL libc does, and the result is two subtly incompatible ABIs - statically linked programs are fine, but if a dynamically linked library exports any function with time_t parameter or return value, it will use whatever size was configured at build time and it becomes a part of its ABI. So fixing this properly would require every library that wants to pass time_t values in its API to implement its own name mangling. That's not a reasonable request for a barely used platform (remember, this is just 32bit userland, 64bit was always unaffected).
Great, then we just leave everything alone and say 32-bit user land is broken past 2038, doubt too many people are dying to run 32-bit userland after that, but if they are I can guarantee they'll be running old binaries probably without source.
I might be selfish for saying so, but if anyone set up their mind to run anything on a 32-bit system after 2038, they must care enough to compile themselves, right? Any binaries compiled today will be EOL by then.
I think this is a reasonable assumption, but my experience suggests it will absolutely not be true for a lot of proprietary software.
That being said, that stuff will only be supported on rhel which will bend over backwards to keep it sort of working somehow.