Hi, As the maintainer of julia (a technical computing language built on top of LLVM), I am wondering whether I should continue supporting the i386 architecture.
The bottom line is that julia needs SSE2 (and porting it to the x87 FPU requires changes that are beyond what I am willing/able to do, see [1] for more details). And the presence of SSE2 is not guaranteed on the i386 architecture. So I have two options: either ship a i386 package that only works on SSE2 processors (ideally giving a meaningful error message when run on older CPUs); or drop support for i386, which is a disservice to our users (the few who have a SSE2-capable but not x86-64-capable processor will be left out; and those who are running the i386 arch on a x86-64-capable processor will have to cross-grade to amd64 or at least use multi-arch with a 64-bit kernel). Also note that my understanding is that some i386 buildds are not SSE2-capable (because they are qemu guests configured as such). So, if I were to ship an i386 package requiring SSE2, the testsuite would fail on those buildds (meaning that I would have to make the testsuite non fatal, or ask for blacklisting of those buildd). What's your opinion on this issue? [1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/7185 -- .''`. Sébastien Villemot : :' : Debian Developer `. `' http://www.dynare.org/sebastien `- GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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