> On 1 Aug 2022, at 11:10, Hugo Melder <ad...@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.