[FFmpeg-devel] forcing ints to be 64 bits, possible new FATE client idea

[Ganesh Ajjanagadde]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 6:18 AM, wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 06:00:21 -0400
> Ganesh Ajjanagadde <gajjanag at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> I don't "expect support" from anyone. Frankly, I have dealt with
>> enough mud from you, who seems to take great pleasure in criticizing
>> or otherwise derailing every patch/discussion of mine to not care
>> about things either way - if you don't want me, just say the word, and
>> I will be gone. And your own stance on this point is not even clear -
>> GCC 20 is not going to hit the shelves this decade.
>
> Nobody is throwing mud at you. But your patches are mostly
> "theoretical" changes, often without much proof that they are really
> necessary, or cosmetic changes. While many of these changes are quite
> ok and actually improve the code base a bit, they also generate a LOT
> of traffic and discussion. This can be exhausting, especially if you
> have to care about other things. So yes, it's all kind of noisy and
> annoying. Sorry.

No problem - thanks for speaking up.

>
> This doesn't mean you should go away, or that we don't want you, or
> that you should stop doing what you do. On the opposite, I think you're
> a promising new developer, and you should definitely stay.
>
> Maybe you should feel encouraged to get on the next level. For example,
> you could enter the fuzzing-security-bugs business, or the
> rewrite-inline-asm-as-yasm business. Or pick anything that looks
> interesting to you; you already have enough experience with this project
> that you will find your way. You will learn new useful things, and the
> result will be useful for everyone. It should also be more fun than
> fixing theoretical standards issues.

Got it.

>
>> Since you seem to be an "expert" on what things affect this decade,
>> why don't you spend 5 minutes trying to outline to beginners like me
>> what is "actually important" in your view?
>
> Important is fixing bugs that actually could affect people right now.
> I do agree that ffmpeg should follow standards, and that code assuming
> sizeof(int)==4 is buggy and should be fixed. But is it important enough
> that we should go and turn around every single line of code? Or,
> alternatively, depend on an ancient compiler, and work through
> potentially hundreds of FATE failures? And only because someone _could_
> decide that new architectures will use 64 bit ints? I don't think so.

Ok, I will send patches if I see issues while working on some other
thing, but not do a mass cleanup. Thanks.

>
> The likeliness of this happening is very low anyway. Just look at
> Windows: they decided that even the "long" type should remain 32 bit,
> because making it 64 bit (like on Unix) would break way too much code.
> The most likely scenario is that a 128 bit architecture will have the
> same types and sizes as 64 bit systems, just with size_t/ptrdiff_t
> being 128 bit, and a new "long long long int" type (I swear, they will
> do it, even if that type name looks horrible).

> _______________________________________________
> ffmpeg-devel mailing list
> ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org
> http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel