[Vm-dev] Re: Alien on Spur and "el capitan"?

[David T. Lewis]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 01:48:35PM -0700, John McIntosh wrote:
>  
> Ok, you know there is a test plugin squeakSUnitTester (See the *m/h files)
>  I made to check types being passed to/from the Objective-C interface to
> confirm things are being transferred/received correctly.  However I did
> write something similar for the FFI interface where, or using using
> Smalltalk code where I iterated over the entire range of +/- 2 billion then
> edge cases for LargePositive/Negative integers for each point where we
> added another byte of accuracy for a few bytes.   The reasons for that was
> to confirm that integer conversion was working correctly for all cases when
> we had migrated to 32bit clean code a decade back.
> 

Hi John,

It wasn't really a decade back. Well not quite ;-)

Your mention of the FFI interface reminds me of the work we did to make
the old FFI 32/64 bit clean. We never got that harvested into the VM, but
the patches circa 2008 are still out there on the Mantis report at
http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7237

I truly do not know if this has relevance any more, but maybe you and Eliot
could comment? There were pointer size issues that had to be addressed in
the image as well as in the plugin and support code, so some of it might
still be of interest.

Dave