Re: 64bit Windows builds

William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:

On 1/18/2012 6:13 AM, Lester Caine wrote: A much better reason for not supporting the build is probably that the 64bit compiler is not available in the free development stack? We have to buy a development stack to get the 64bit compiler which blocks rather than working with the publicly available process:( But actually that is a better reason for supplying a 64 bit build, and why others are providing that service. Actually, no. There are any number of free mechanisms to build 64 bit code. Could you elaborate on that?

Building 64bit windows applications which are VC9 compliant would seem to need the 'official' compiler, and while I have not done a lot of looking, there was nothing being offered when I tried to set up the windows build environment form Pierre's original notes although that was some time ago. I ended up buying an M$ development pack to plug the hole.

The root problem is that Windows "WIN64" is a 64P architecture. Linux and *nix variants, on the other hand, are 64ILP or 64LP. Meaning Windows has longs/ints which are undersized compared to the *nix brethren. The old and stale abuse such as unsigned long X = (unsigned long)pY; will not do what the author intended. This means all packages ported to *nix 64 bits may have very serious flaws which have not been fixed for*Windows 64 bit* architecture. I'd anticipate CoApp identifying and resolving most of these applicable to PHP over the coming months, but it is a non-trivial problem requiring a number of pairs of eyeballs to get right.

I do accept that there are inherent problems with the current unsupported builds, my own sites have not had any errors in serving PHP pages via a 64bit Apache/PHP/Firebird stack on 64 bit windows XP. But I am more than happy to help if a serious effort is made to tidy this up, and I still have two sites that I can soak test on, although one of them is scheduled to switch to Linux in the next six months. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php