[Breaking Change Request] Remove support for ia32 from the dart sdk

[a-siva]

Intended Change

Remove support for ia32 from the dart-sdk completely starting with Dart SDK version 3.8.0. The ia32 distributions for all releases starting with 3.8.0 will be removed on dart.dev and other release channels.

Rationale

This variant is not in use anymore

Expected Impact

Users will not be able to install and run Dart SDK on ia32 architecture based systems.

Projects known to break

None

Projects that will not be affected

Flutter
All Google internal projects

Migration Steps

Any project affected by this change needs to switch to the x64 artifacts or stay on Dart SDK version 3.7.0.

[a-siva]

//cc @mit-mit @athomas @itsjustkevin

[mit-mit]

Posted on Dart Announce

[mit-mit]

LGTM

[Piero512]

Will this remove support for Dart compiled to IA32?

I had a minor concern over 32 bit DLLs which are common on Windows that will not be able to be connected through IPC by deploying a Dart solution.

Say, a Flutter app needs to interact with an old scanner library and can't load libtwain and the vendor library of the scanner on a different process written in dart, because Dart dropped IA-32 support, so it would need to be written in a different language that didn't drop x86 support.

Damn, there's so much legacy on Windows.

[a-siva]

Will this remove support for Dart compiled to IA32?

Yes.

[a-siva]

Say, a Flutter app needs to interact with an old scanner library and can't load libtwain and the vendor library of the scanner on a different process written in dart, because Dart dropped IA-32 support, so it would need to be written in a different language that didn't drop x86 support.

The different process written in Dart could still run using Dart 3.7

[itsjustkevin]

@mraleph @leonsenft and @johnmccutchan could you take a look at this breaking change request?

[mraleph]

LGTM

[johnmccutchan]

LGTM

[johnmccutchan]

@zanderso FYI

[itsjustkevin]

Marking this breaking change as approved.

[ntkme]

FYI @nex3

We need to change cli_pkg slightly once this is rolled into 3.8.0-dev.

Also, I propose that we plan ahead and drop ia32 support for dart-sass at its 2.0 release, so that we don't have to worry about getting stuck at dart-sdk 3.7 in between dart-sass 2.0 and 3.0.

[nex3]

Yeah, that plan sounds reasonable to me. I'm not wholly opposed to just dropping support for ia32 ourselves without making it an official breaking change, just because our hands are tied by the upstream support, but it's definitely better to roll it into a major release since we have one coming anyway.

[mraleph]

I have received information about internal users which depend on X86 build, so I am marking this blocked for now - meaning that we can't proceed.

[mraleph]

After chatting with @mit-mit we have arrived to the conclusion that we can proceed with the breaking change and remove support from official builds of the dart sdk.

[mit-mit]

Breaking change approved

[mit-mit]

Updating dart.dev in dart-lang/site-www#6390

[a-siva]

After chatting with @mit-mit we have arrived to the conclusion that we can proceed with the breaking change and remove support from official builds of the dart sdk.

What about the internal test issue, has that been resolved ?

[mraleph]

What about the internal test issue, has that been resolved ?

This is just about removing public Dart SDK builds. We will have to keep the code around until internal users have migrated away.

[a-siva]

What about the internal test issue, has that been resolved ?

This is just about removing public Dart SDK builds. We will have to keep the code around until internal users have migrated away.

Thanks for the clarification, this breaking request change was for complete removal of support for ia32 from the Dart SDK and it was marked as LGTM hence the confusion.

[parlough]

@mit-mit @mraleph Should the archive surface the builds for 3.7 as the final stable release with support or 3.6?

[mit-mit]

3.7.x as the last supported per #59698, please.