this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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So the Steam client will have to be updated to 64-bit before 2038.
Not really. 32-bit apps can use 64-bit values.
So this is only a problem for 32-bit apps on 32-bit processors?
It's a problem with the internal represensation of a C/C++ type alias called
time_t, mostly. That's the thing that holds the number of elapsed seconds since midnight on Jan. 1, 1970, which is the most common low-level representation of date and time on computers. In theory,time_tcould point to a 32-bit type even on a 64-bit system, but I don't think anyone's actually dumb enough to do that. It affects more than C/C++ code because most programming languages end up calling C libraries once you go down enough levels.In other words, there's no way you can tell whether a given application is affected or not unless you're aware of the code details, regardless of the bitness of the program and the processor it's running on.