[Gambas-user] Gambas RoadMap

[Rob Kudla]

On Wed July 5 2006 10:20, Vincenzo Ing. Virgilio wrote:
> Why, you should ask, becouse your actual computer has not an
> AMD64 or EM64T processor inside?
> Becouse your next computer will do.

I agree.... the cheapest computer I could buy from Wal-Mart when 
my server died last winter was 64-bit, and when we were shopping 
for a new laptop (which needs to run Gambas as well as some 
video programs that aren't 64-bit ready either) it was hard to 
find a laptop that fit our specs and was 32-bit.  (Yes, you can 
install 32-bit operating systems on AMD64, but as I understand 
it there's a noticeable performance hit.)

But after digging through the source code myself when I was 
trying to build Gambas2 on my 64-bit machine, I recognize that 
it is going to be a difficult task.  It will require adding a 
whole layer of abstraction to all Gambas datatypes and internal 
data structures in order to make a Gambas program compiled on a 
32-bit machine run on a 64-bit one and vice versa.  It must have 
been tough getting the endian problem sorted and the 64-bit 
problem is much bigger.  

And it will change the Gambas bytecode format, so it needs to be 
done by Benoit unless one of us can come up with a set of 
acceptable patches within a few days after a 1.9 series 
release ;)

Rob