32-bit OS compatibility

[upward4]

Is compatibility with 32-bit OSes technically achievable? If so, what are the current showstoppers?

[jameshoulahan]

Technically, yes. The issue is that the golang code generated by ANTLR4 isn't 32-bit compatible. The issue has been around for a while. We could probably hack the generated code to make it 32-bit compatible but as Bridge no longer supports 32-bit anyway, we didn't bother doing that yet.

If you want to build it yourself for 32-bit, fork this repo, apply the sed hack (from a comment in the linked issue), add a replace directive for this repo with your own fork in bridge's go.mod, and it should work on 32-bit (untested).

[upward4]

as Bridge no longer supports 32-bit anyway, we didn't bother doing that yet.

But the exact reason why bridge doesn't support 32-bit is that ANTLR4 isn't 32-bit compatible, right? Or are you saying there were other considerations when choosing to drop support for 32-bit in the bridge?

[jameshoulahan]

Sorry for just getting back to this now.

The original reason we considered dropping 32-bit support came from unrecoverable errors in etcd-io's bbolt database affecting all our target OSes when running 32-bit builds. We reported the issue upstream early last year but that report got no traction. Our product team made the decision to only support 64-bit from around that point on because running 32-bit builds was no longer considered stable and there wasn't anything we could realistically do; it also aligned with the general trend of OSes at the time.

And yes, now that we wrote our RFC5322 parser using ANTLR4, we have a second factor to take into account.