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Minecraft now will require Java 21 and a 64bit OS as of latest snapshot (minecraft.net)
24 points by haunter on April 5, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


Why does Minecraft care about you running a 64Bit OS if it's written in pure Java?


Minecraft itself perhaps does not care, but a 32-bit JVM process will have a 4Gb heap tops (3Gb on Windows) that will make the playing experience either unpleasant (i.e. constant garbage collection running in parallel and stopping Minecraft worlds) or will plainly fail as Minecraft creates a very large number of objects, esp. in large worlds, that won't fit into the JVM heap – each thing in Minecraft is a Java object.


Maybe it’s written in “pure Java” in the sense that the Minecraft source code is all Java. (Maybe. I don’t know.)

However, it definitely has dependencies that are not pure Java. I think Minecraft used to use LWJGL, I’m not sure if Minecraft does use it any more, but I wouldn’t be surprised if LWJGL or other libraries dropped 64-bit platform support for various reasons. Inside LWJGL there’s use of JNI.


Oracle stopped distributing JVM for 32-bit Windows after Java 8. Minecraft was using Java 17, and there were other 32-bit distributions for it, but I couldn't find a 32-bit distribution of Java 21.


For those not aware, check out Vintage Story and Veloren, both interesting projects heavily inspired by Minecraft.


lazyweb: https://www.vintagestory.at/ and some stuff at https://github.com/anegostudios/vsmodelcreator (Apache 2) but it does not appear the game itself is open source

Veloren just shipped 0.16 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 and has been discussed extensively https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...




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