Re: [Chicken-users] long pointer equivalent

[Perry E. Metzger]

Peter Keller <address@hidden> writes:
> > I'd say autoconf style mechanisms are the only way to retain sanity
> > for such things. When you build the chicken runtime for a particular
> > platform, you find out what the width is and you abstract that in
> > the library so it uses the discovered value.
> 
> Can you give an example of sich an abstraction? My brain is a little
> slow today.

The idea is that when you're building the library, the scripts that do
the build go off and find out information you need that is likely to
vary from platform to platform and then set things for you.

It is easiest to understand in C, I suppose. A GNU Autoconf'ed program
goes through a lot of scripts during build that generate a config.h
file which is full of defines that are set to tell you "this platform
has the foo() call" or "a pointer is eight bytes on this
platform". The code is then #if'ed to deal with the config.h output.

Perry