Re: Classpath build process and VM-specific issues

[Andrew Haley]

Etienne Gagnon writes:
 > I should have compiled with -pedantic, of course...  I've included a few 
 > fixes
 > in the attachment.
 > 
 > >> malloc() returns a char*, not a jbyte*.
 > 
 >         [#1] byte
 >         addressable  unit  of  data storage large enough to hold any
 >         member  of  the  basic  character  set  of   the   execution
 >         environment
 > 
 >         [#2]  NOTE 1 It  is  possible to express the address of each
 >         individual byte of an object uniquely.
 > 
 >         [#3] NOTE 2 A byte is composed of a contiguous  sequence  of
 >         bits,  the  number  of which is implementation-defined.  The
 >         least significant bit is called the low-order bit; the  most
 >         significant bit is called the high-order bit.
 > 
 >         3.5
 >         [#1] character
 >         bit representation that fits in a byte                       *
 > 
 > 
 > Do we actually have to deal with platforms that have non 8-bit chars?

Maybe, but that's not the only thing.  It's possible to define jbyte
so that it is an 8 bit signed value but not a character type, and JNI
does not forbid this.  I suspect that all the platforms we use define
jbyte to be a character type, but I can see no overpowering reason to
introduce a dependency on that.

 > I guess quite a few other things/algorithms in the class library would
 > break if it is so...

Perhaps it's time to fix them, then.

 > It's fine to be pedantic, but up to a point...

That depends on what you mean by pedantry.  Both issues are in a sense
pedantic: the 128-bit pointer type and the non-character jbyte type.

Andrew.