I don’t disagree but please use a better source. LLMs are useful for many things but they are not good as a citable source of knowledge about the real world. Talk to the LLMs all you like but if you want to make factual claims then Gemini et al are inadmissible as evidence.
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The points raised in this topic still hold, to my knowledge: there’s little benefit dropping 32-bit builds given we still need to support 32-bit execution. Other platforms we support (e.g. WASI) also require 32-bit, meaning there are many fewer ‘simplification’ benefits.
A
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Right, this is still true. And 32-bit execution still works fine on any Windows OS - it doesn’t need to be a 32-bit OS to run 32-bit executables (or more critically, to load 32-bit DLLs in a 32-bit process).
If package maintainers want to stop releasing wheels for 32-bit Windows, that’s between them and their users. Right now, dropping 32-bit Windows and picking up ARM64 Windows is probably a good trade, though in most cases the cost will be close to zero anyway.
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Relevant: Rust just did this Demoting i686-pc-windows-gnu to Tier 2 | Rust Blog
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Rust had two different 32-bit Windows tier 1 targets and they’re only demoting one of them to tier 2. Their MSVC-based 32-bit Windows target is still tier 1.
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I was made aware of this thread on this PR GH-141362: Make `get_externals` handle fetching platform-specific release artifacts by savannahostrowski · Pull Request #142405 · python/cpython · GitHub
A couple of years have passed since the start of this thread and lots of things have changed especially around the development for this platform (JIT and tail calling interpreter to call a couple of things).
How’s the sentiment of folks about demoting Windows 32-bit to tier-2/3?
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Has anything materially changed since April?
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This happened 
Lately I’ve seen PR (JIT related) passing for all platforms except Windows 32bit just because it is not a standard way to build CPython on Windows (32bit builds on a 64bit OS).
This doesn’t reflect the 32-bit execution point, but we’ve been counting file downloads from python.org for nearly four days (see File Downloads at the end of this page).
This is only clicks via the website, and not any direct downloads, so isn’t the full picture or directly comparable with these numbers.
| Category | Filename | Visitors | V % | Events | E % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.Z-amd64.exe | 173,867 | 51.6% | 215,989 | 51.8% |
| Win | python-manager-X.Y.msix | 109,337 | 32.5% | 140,203 | 33.6% |
| source | Python-X.Y.Z.tar.xz | 26,544 | 7.9% | 30,984 | 7.4% |
| macOS | python-X.Y.Z-macos11.pkg | 15,035 | 4.5% | 16,362 | 3.9% |
| source | Python-X.Y.Z.tgz | 3,974 | 1.2% | 4,314 | 1.0% |
| Win 32-bit | python-X.Y.Z.exe | 1,638 | 0.5% | 1,838 | 0.4% |
| Win 32-bit | python-X.Y.Z.msi | 1,254 | 0.4% | 1,464 | 0.4% |
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.Z-embed-amd64.zip | 1,158 | 0.3% | 1,293 | 0.3% |
| Android | python-X.Y.Z-aarch64-linux-android.tar.gz | 753 | 0.2% | 827 | 0.2% |
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.amd64.msi | 639 | 0.2% | 722 | 0.2% |
| Win | python-manager-X.Y.msi | 567 | 0.2% | 634 | 0.2% |
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.Z.amd64.msi | 464 | 0.1% | 536 | 0.1% |
| Android | python-X.Y.Z-x86_64-linux-android.tar.gz | 377 | 0.1% | 422 | 0.1% |
| macOS | python-X.Y.Z-macosx10.9.pkg | 368 | 0.1% | 440 | 0.1% |
| Win 32-bit | python-X.Y.msi | 315 | 0.1% | 345 | 0.1% |
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.Z-arm64.exe | 127 | 0.0% | 139 | 0.0% |
| source | Python-X.Y.tgz | 74 | 0.0% | 77 | 0.0% |
| Win 32-bit | python-X.Y.Z-embed-win32.zip | 71 | 0.0% | 80 | 0.0% |
| Win 64-bit | python-X.Y.Z-amd64-webinstall.exe | 66 | 0.0% | 123 | 0.0% |
| other | Python-X.Y.Z.tgz.spdx.json | 47 | 0.0% | 50 | 0.0% |
| Win 32-bit | Python-X.Y.Z.exe | 27 | 0.0% | 29 | 0.0% |
| other | python-X.Y.Z-amd64.exe.spdx.json | 27 | 0.0% | 28 | 0.0% |
| Win 32-bit | BeOpen-Python-X.Y.exe | 25 | 0.0% | 27 | 0.0% |
| macOS | python-X.Y-macosx10.5.dmg | 22 | 0.0% | 22 | 0.0% |
| macOS | python-X.Y.Z-macosx10.6.pkg | 19 | 0.0% | 19 | 0.0% |
| Win 32-bit | python-X.Y.Z-webinstall.exe | 18 | 0.0% | 22 | 0.0% |
| Total | 336,813 | 100.0% | 416,989 | 100.0% |
Here’s just the categories (I think I got the categorisation correct):
| Category | Visitors | V % | Events | E % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Win 64-bit | 176,321 | 52.3% | 218,802 | 52.5% |
| Win | 109,904 | 32.6% | 140,837 | 33.8% |
| source | 30,592 | 9.1% | 35,375 | 8.5% |
| macOS | 15,444 | 4.6% | 16,843 | 4.0% |
| Win 32-bit | 3,348 | 1.0% | 3,805 | 0.9% |
| Android | 1,130 | 0.3% | 1,249 | 0.3% |
| other | 74 | 0.0% | 78 | 0.0% |
| Total | 336,813 | 100.0% | 416,989 | 100.0% |
And Windows-only, ignoring the new Python install manager:
| Category | Visitors | V % | Events | E % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Win 64-bit | 176,321 | 98.1% | 218,802 | 98.3% |
| Win 32-bit | 3,348 | 1.9% | 3,805 | 1.7% |
| Total | 179,669 | 100.0% | 222,607 | 100.0% |
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