[Gambas-user] 64 bits news

[Benoit Minisini]

On jeudi 17 janvier 2008, José Luis Redrejo wrote:
> 2008/1/17, Benoit Minisini <gambas at ...1...>:
> > Yeh, I got the 1000th commit.
> >
> > In this commit, the extern function implementation has been redesigned
> > and is
> > now based on libffi, a library I discovered at 1:00 in the morning.
> >
> > This library allows to call any function in a shared library on any
> > system.
> > The old Gambas system only worked on 32 bits OS.
>
> Great!
>
>
> Alas everything is not perfect. Because of a flaw in the compiler design,
>
> > projects that use the Pointer datatype will have to be recompiled to be
> > used
> > on a 64 bits system.
>
> This flaw will be fixed in Gambas 3. The 64 bits interpreter will be
>
> > backported to the future 2.1 version of Gambas, and will have this flaw.
>
> How do we know if a project user  such  datatype?  I mean,  could you
> report if some of the gambas based components use it? . It would be good to
> know if we could avoid recompiling the projects.
>
> Regards

No Gambas component use it. Some C/C++ component use it, but they are not a 
problem. 

Nobody should use the Pointer datatype. It is only there for extern functions, 
and for properties like Image.Data that returns a pointer to the image data 
in memory. 

So people that really need it should be programmer advanced enough for being 
aware of 64 bits/32 bits tricks.

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini