Re: RFC: Cygwin 64 bit?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Sat, Jul 02, 2011 at 08:53:27AM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On Jul  2 01:11, Charles Wilson wrote:
>> Hey, Yaakov -- what about this wild idea:  What if, cygwin64-1.dll's
>> implementation of dlopen() -- and remember, cygwin64-1.dll can only be
>> linked/loaded by a 64bit process -- automatically translated all
>> attempts to dlopen .../path/to/cyg*.dll to FIRST attempt to open
>> cyg64*dll, then (if cyg*dll was actually 64bit, rather than the expected
>> 32bit) fall back to the specified name?
>
>I'm wondering why we didn't do this in the first place?  In theory
>there's nothing which speaks against dlopen("/path/to/libfoo.so") to
>check for valid combinations:
>
>  - /path/to/libfoo.so
>  - /path/to/libfoo.dll
>  - /path/to/cygfoo.dll (32 bit) or /path/to/cyg64foo.dll (64 bit)
>
>shouldn't that ease the pain?

I was going to suggest this yesterday and then decided that we must have
discussed it at some point but I was too tired to research it.

I think it makes sense to do something like this.  The only problem is
that I'm sure somebody will say (and maybe it's already said in the
replies that I haven't read yet).  "Oh no!  You can't do that!  What
if someone wants to try to load libfoo.so and ignore cygfoo.dll???"

If that is an actual concern, I'm sure we could provide some sort of API
to force the desired behavior.

cgf