[flint-devel] use of long in the FLINT API

[Michael A. <mab...@go...>]

Hi Bill,

at SD 10 we had a chat about using "long" in the FLINT headers and in
general. Since we integration with FLINT and Sage is getting tighter
and tighter, i.e. #4965 in Sage's trac, I am wondering what the long
term plan is here because of the Windows port. In the development
version's flint.h you already have something like

#define ulong unsigned long

#if FLINT_BITS == 32
#define half_ulong uint16_t
#define half_long int16_t
#define HALF_FLINT_BITS 16
#else
#define half_ulong uint32_t
#define half_long int32_t
#define HALF_FLINT_BITS 32
#endif

Would it be possible to also declare appropriate 64 bit types here
since we cannot assume that sizeof(long)==8 on 64 bit platforms in
general? Obviously the native Windows port won't happen next week, but
since FLINT 2.0 is a while out it might be good to think about this
now :) The SFU port of Sage also has to deal with sizeof(long)==4 in
64 bit mode AFAIK, so this is a lot more concrete than I want it to
be.

Cheers,

Michael