Dropping Meteor 32-bit support

[hwillson]

Given that Mongo is forcing our hand by discontinuing all 32-bit support, the time has come for Meteor to consider dropping its 32-bit support. A few quick notes:

• On MacOS, Meteor currently only supports 64-bit based binaries.
• On Windows, Meteor currently only supports 32-bit based binaries.
• On *nix, Meteor currently supports 32-bit and 64-bit based binaries.

Considering the above, dropping 32-bit support could have the largest impact to Windows and 32-bit only *nix users. Given that only 0.97% of *nix based Meteor (1.4 and 1.5) usage in the last 30 days was on a 32-bit architecture (see meteor/meteor#8864 (comment)), the impact to *nix users should be fairly low. It would be great to see similar stats on the Windows side of things, but if Mongo has decided now is a good time to drop 32-bit support, they must have also decided the negative impact of doing so is quite low.

Can anyone think of any compelling reasons why we shouldn't drop 32-bit support? Please keep in mind we're referring to reasons against dropping 32-bit support for Meteor's officially supported architectures, so not including things like ARM, *BSD, etc.

[hwillson]

Hi all - to help move this forward, here is a quick brain dump of changes that will need to be considered as part of this work. This list is not exhaustive, and some of it can only be handled by MDG, but it's a start. Feedback welcome!

Building / Publishing

• Stop building / publishing os.linux.x86_32 / os.windows.x86_32 versions of the following (and start building / publishing os.windows.x86_64):
  -> Main Meteor distribution (aka the bootstrap tarball)
  -> dev_bundle

• Remove the x86_32 options from scripts/admin/publish-meteor-tool-on-all-platforms.sh and scripts/admin/publish-meteor-tool-on-arch.sh.

• Update the Windows installer to look for meteor-bootstrap-os.windows.x86_64.tar.gz instead of meteor-bootstrap-os.windows.x86_32.tar.gz.

• Disable the os.linux.x86_32 and os.windows.x86_32 build options available via build.meteor.com (and add os.windows.x86_64 if the build farm is sticking around).

• Update the architecture checks in the following files, to disallow 32 bit architectures:
  -> meteor
  -> scripts/admin/launch-meteor
  -> scripts/build-dev-bundle-common.sh

• Disable the 32-bit Mongo version fetch when generating the Window dev_bundle.

CLI

• Remove the meteor admin get-machine 32-bit options (os.linux.x86_32, os.windows.x86_32) and possibly add a os.windows.x86_64 option (if the build farm is sticking around).

• Adjust the CLI's allowed architectures.

• Adjust the host architecture strings used by the CLI.

• Update all allowed architectures in the CLI help (removing os.linux.x86_32 and os.windows.x86_32, adding os.windows.x86_64).

Utils

• Update all architecture helper functions to reflect the goodbye os.linux.x86_32 / os.windows.x86_32, hello os.windows.x86_64 changes.

[davidworkman9]

@aadamsx There isn't even a development version of 3.6 yet, at least as far as I can tell. So technically MongoDB's holding things up as well.. 😄

[aadamsx]

@davidworkman9 -- snarky ain'tcha. I was using the term holding up loosely. 😂

[justbill2020]

Can we get windows 64 bit pushed out sooner rather than later and then remove the 32 bit at a future date... specifically this is an issue as stated in #8871

[hwillson]

@justbill2020 Meteor 1.6 now ships with Windows 64-bit support.

[justbill2020]

@hwillson This is awesome!!! thank you

[benjamn]

@hwillson Do we still need/want to drop 32bit support (any time soon)? Could this wait until Meteor 1.7, perhaps? Or would it simplify things in the short term?

[justbill2020]

I still had to copy the 64 bit version of z7.exe to speed up the build times on the latest version... so that hasn’t been updated yet

[abernix]

@justbill2020 We added the code that was supposed to make that differentiation to the 64-bit dev bundle, as seen here:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/9b056f5e911513fb3df716bd524d504cceb863f4/scripts/generate-dev-bundle.ps1#L64-L80

Can you share the full path to the location that you're copying the 7z.exe to? Did you reinstall with the new Chocolatey installer? (If not, you're probably not using the 64-bit version of Meteor either.)

[justbill2020]

what's a new chocolatey installer? These are projects that I upgrade using the cli.

This is the path i'm i copy the 64 bit version of 7z.exe:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\.meteor\packages\meteor-tool\1.6.0\mt-os.windows.x86_32\dev_bundle\bin

[benjamn]

@justbill2020 Please refer to the Windows installation instructions in the Meteor 1.6 release announcement! https://blog.meteor.com/announcing-meteor-1-6-abf30f29e2c6

[hwillson]

@benjamn

Do we still need/want to drop 32bit support (any time soon)? Could this wait until Meteor 1.7, perhaps? Or would it simplify things in the short term?

Now that we're allowing 64-bit OS users to use Mongo >= 3.4, I think the pressure to drop 32-bit support has definitely been lessened. I still think it's something that should be done at some point (especially since it will simplify Meteor's codebase and deployment procedures), but waiting until Meteor 1.7 sounds good to me. Thanks!

[filipenevola]

This FR was implemented here meteor/meteor#10933