Re: Big Brother is Real

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 10:37:19AM -0800, Stephan Mueller wrote:
>Can someone elaborate on exactly which APIs have changed incompatibly
>(in 64-bit Windows)?
>
>I'm only mildly familiar with the 64-bit story, but my understanding is
>that the the 64-bit APIs are basically the same as 32-bit (with the
>natural widening of types) but given that the 64-bit API is 'new' in
>that there's no legacy (shipped, binary) code base to support, this is
>probably the best time to make API changes (in 64-bit) that repair bad
>design decisions and bad interface bugs and so made earlier (in 32-bit
>API, or maybe even 16-bit).
>
>Regardless, how does this affect Cygwin at all?  The 32-bit subsystem on
>64-bit Windows OSes should run 32-bit apps with no semantic changes --
>that's its job, and I would be surprised if the behaviour of any 32-bit
>APIs was gratuitously different (although it's possible there are bugs
>-- worth reporting if that's the case).
>
>If you're trying to compile cygwin itself for 64-bit, well, you may need
>to make some cygwin source changes with #ifdefs, yes -- is that the
>objection here?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the iffy decisions that cygwin makes
just break on the 64-bit Windows.  It's not Microsoft's fault if they
change an undocumented behavior.  Cygwin relies on a few undocumented-but-consistent
behaviors to do some of its magic.

I think the only problem is that Cygwin probably just needs to be debugged
to see what's going on.  If someone wants to send me a nice 64 bit system
running WinXP 64 (or whatever it's called), I'll see what I can do.

cgf

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