Re: error while compiling base

[David Chisnall]

On 17 Feb 2010, at 22:44, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> No, it's a typo made when converting from using the old, reliable, 
> LONG_LONG_MAX (basically worked on every platform except perhaps BSD, and 
> used to be the default but is now the fallback mechanism) to the newer c99 
> standard (which works on most modern platforms and is now the default, but 
> used to be the fallback mechanism).

Ah, fair enough.

> I know you are a BSD person, but the reality is that GNUstep is GNU software 
> and uses the GNU compiler (GCC) ... so saying something 'will break anywhere 
> except GNU platforms' is actually pretty close to saying that it will break 
> anywhere that GNUstep doesn't run, and sounds perilously like a religious 
> argument.  


Not at all.  It's from limits.h, which is provided by libc.  The C standard 
defines LLONG_MAX.  GNU libc and HP-UX libc define LONG_LONG_MAX, but most 
other libc's that I checked don't.  AIX defines LONGLONG_MAX, others define 
their own flavour, in addition to the standard LLONG_MAX.  Both the long long 
type and the LLONG_MAX macro in limits.h were defined at the same time, as part 
of C99.  

GCC, on the other hand, has a built-in __LONG_LONG_MAX__, which is set by the 
compiler based on the target triple and is used on some libc versions to 
initialise LLONG_MAX.  I'd have no problems with your using __LONG_LONG_MAX__, 
since, as far as I know, this works on all existing Objective-C compilers that 
support a long long data type.

Unless I'm mistaken, GNUstep runs on a lot of non-GNU platforms.  If this isn't 
the case, maybe someone should delete some of the 11 listed here (not counting 
duplicates for different versions or CPU architectures): 

http://gnustep.org/resources/documentation/User/GNUstep/machines_toc.html

This is contrasted with just GNU/Linux listed on the same page, although I did 
manage to get GNUstep running on GNU/OpenSolaris a while ago, and I believe 
others have run it on GNU HURD.  We probably also work on GNU/kFreeBSD, meaning 
that we only support about three times as many non-GNU platforms as GNU 
platforms.

David

-- Sent from my IBM 1620