Re: Using int32_t instead of IV for code

[Dan Sugalski]

At 11:44 PM 9/13/2001 +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
>If bytecode is 32 bit, and we want an opaque C type to be a thing capable
>of representing 32 bits, as ANSI allows structure padding I believe that
>there's no guarantee that sizeof an array of two of them is 8 chars
>(by which I am assuming 64bits.)

Basically on platforms that can't do 32-bits easily we'll preprocess the 
input, the same way we would if we passed a little-endian bytecode stream 
to a big-endian machine.

Right now we mmap for simplicity, but the ultimate "right" way to do things is:

   1) Open bytecode
   2a) Check endian signature
   2b) Check bytecode size
   3) If 2a and 2b don't match our requirements, generate a temporary 
in-memory version that does
   4) Run code

We need to get that done soonish, so we can pass bytecode between alpha and 
x86 systems, as well as get the bytecode endian translator written.

                                        Dan

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