Re: [Java-gnome-developer] handlers as ints?

[R. A. R. D. <riv...@ya...>]

--- Mark Howard <mh...@ca...> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 10:53:35AM -0500, Jeffrey Morgan wrote:
> > > 64bits OSes? As I see it, two solutions are posible: 1. Have a
> handler
> > > table to make the conversion, 2. Change everything to long and
> > > recompile.
> 
> Since we're using jni, some recompilation will have to be done for
> each
> architecture anyway. Why is it such a bad thing to use longs on 64
> bit
> architectures and ints on the others?
> 

Advantages
1. Only one code to handle all architectures. Only a tiny piece of C
code have to be conditionally compiled on every platform. The rest is
the same.

2. Java code can't play with handlers, they can just take it, not
operate it, thus avoiding possible bugs.

3. Once the gnome-java package is installed in a platform, the
applications on top of it are truly platform independent, so for final
users is easier to install: they don't need to download the sources and
compile, they only need to download the application and install it, it
will work on any architecture. That's one of the beauties of Java.

corollary: Commercial applications based only on gnome-java and other
java packages will be available on all architectures, not only in x86
as is the usual.

> I would expect your proposal to have unnecessary run-time performance
> hits.

Portability ussually have a cost, in this case one more indirection
when accessing a GTK/GNOME handler (Instead of get int handle field, it
should be get Handle field, then get int/long handle field).
In my case I vote for one more indirection with total arch
independence.

Rivas.


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