Re: x32 “half” arrived… now what?
On 06/06/13 21:10, Adam Borowski wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 09:58:00AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Be aware that x32 has sizeof(time_t) > sizeof(long), so you should expect
>> SUBSTANTIAL porting of packages to be required. Particularly since that
>> arrangement is explicitly unsupported by the GNU coding standards:
>>
>> Similarly, don't make any effort to cater to the possibility that
>> `long' will be smaller than predefined types like `size_t'.
>
> It was the case in old versions of gnulib, but appears to be no more.
> Too bad, quite a few packages ship embedded copies of ancient gnulib.
> I just submitted a patch in one such case (#711412), it might possibly
> apply elsewhere.
>
> It was Linus' decree that no new ABI is allowed to suffer from the Y2k38
> bug even if its word size is 32 bit, and I'd say he's right. This means
> that this problem will bite us the next time another 32 bit arch comes,
> so there's no excuse to use this as an argument against x32.
Would a better solution not have been to make long 64 bits? This is a
perfectly reasonable thing to do on a 32 bit arch, it would avoid the above
problem and since the widespread adoption of 64 bit systems most of the
cases of software expecting long to be 32 bits should have been fixed.
Roger
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