Re: Size difference between BOOL, WinBOOL, and BOOL results in incorrect archiving under Windows MSVC

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 1 Aug 2022, at 11:10, Hugo Melder <admin@hugomelder.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Y’all,
> 
> I'm currently investigating various libs-base test failures on Windows 11 
> MSVC and I’m stuck on one particular failure involving the archiving and 
> unarchiving of primitives into a binary bundle 
> (Tests/base/coding/basictypes.m).
> 
> Apple describes NSArchiver as “[..] a concrete subclass of NSCoder [and] 
> provides a way to encode objects into an architecture-independent format that 
> can be stored in a file”. That’s why the test has precomputed .type files 
> (e.g. BOOL-1.type) to validate the output of the archiver.
> 
> This validation fails: On Windows 11 MSVC a bool is 4-bytes long, thus the 
> generated .type file is BOOL-4.type and the unarchive routine fails:
> 
> Failed test:     (2022-06-17 06:35:35.907 +0000) basictypes.m:157 ... can 
> unarchive BOOL from D:/a/libs-base/libs 
> base/source/Tests/base/coding/BOOL-1.type
> 
> 
> Now, there has been some issues related to the difference between BOOL, 
> WinBOOL, and WINBOOL 
> (https://github.com/gnustep/libs-base/pull/247#discussion_r835060626).
> 
> Here the difference:
>       • I can’t find the definition of WinBOOL anywhere in the Windows Kit 
> header files, nor online.
>       • WINBOOL seems to be implicitly defined by the compiler switch -Ze and 
> explicitly defined in GNUstep.
>       • BOOL is defined as typedef int in Windows.h.
> 
> Maybe we can explicitly pack BOOL into one byte while archiving to maintain 
> the architecture-independent format, or redefine BOOL in GNUstep to the 
> correct size?

I don't think it's easily done.

Looking at the objc runtime headers, we have

#       ifdef STRICT_APPLE_COMPATIBILITY
typedef signed char BOOL;
#       else
#               if defined(__vxworks) || defined(_WIN32)
typedef  int BOOL;
#               else
typedef unsigned char BOOL;
#               endif
#       endif

So for portabilty our coding/archiving ought to tolerate either byte or word 
length data in the archive as being valid bool data.