[haiku-development] Re: Feasibility of a 64-bit port?
- From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:52:56 -0400
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Kira Scarlett<rhys@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I thought about an x86_64 port too, but I'm not that excited about trying
> to support legacy x86 stuff (and I have an IA64 box lying around idle most
> of the time). The 64-bit question was general though - are huge chunks of
> Haiku 32-bit specific or would porting to a 64-bit system be fairly
> straightforward?
This is not my area of expertise (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I
am wrong), but it is my understanding that some effort has been made
to make the Haiku (and even the old BeOS) codebase fairly architecture
agnostic. As an example the int32 typedef is used throughout the API
rather than just int or long. See:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/headers/os/support/SupportDefs.h
I don't think you would have much more difficulty porting to a 64-bit
platform than to any other platform. Of course having some backwards
compatibility to run standard 32-bit Haiku or old BeOS applications
may be more difficult. But I guess if Linux and Windows can do it we
could too. It probably could be done with the same sort of hybrid
system we use to support both gcc2 and gcc4 applications and
libraries.
--
Regards,
Ryan
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