At 1:18 PM 1/3/13, Ted Baker wrote:
>This (uid_t and pid_t) is the second round of discussions under
>the Austin Group where I've seen an effort to accomodate systems
>that use 64-bit values (sizes, user id's, process id's, etc.) in
>the OS API but do not have 64-bit long integers.
>
>I'm convinced that it is contrary to the interest of existing
>POSIX/Unix users (including the US Government), application
>developers, and the existing vendors or Unix-compliant operating
>systems to adopt a standard that allows one to call such a system
>"POSIX compliant".
>
[snip]
>.... One cannot argue that one needs binary
>compatibility with legacy 32-bit binaries (or an old ABI), since
>presumably those binaries were compiled to expect 32-bit values
>for the types in question, and so would break if passed 64-bit
>values (an new applications compiled to the old ABI would also
>break).
There is another reason: POSIX claims only *source code* portability.
Binary portability is out of scope.
Joe
|