Why are the 32- and 64-bit cygwin1.dlls incompatible?

[Warren Young]

On 8/22/2013 14:46, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>
>> When execveing a Cygwin process, a lot of data is submitted via shared
>> memory, via data copying...
>
> Since you know that the DLL regions are different what about execing
> the process as if it were a windows native process?

That was my thought.

I assume this data sharing stuff occurs only for Cygwin-to-Cygwin 
exec()s, which is why -- as I recently learned -- cygwin1.dll already 
checks the DLL dependency graph of a process it's about to exec to see 
if it's a Cygwin process.

Couldn't it use this same info to detect that it's about to launch a 
Cygwin program of a different bitness, and fall back to the "native 
Windows program" case?  No attempt to interoperate, just launch it and 
hope for the best.  Fire and forget.

 >> Therefore, interaction between the 32 and 64 bit DLLs is not
 >> supported.

I'd expect it to behave no better than launching a native Win32 console 
program from Cygwin today.

The thing is, that's good enough for a lot of cases.

Consider Orpie, which isn't ported to Cygwin 64 yet because OCaml isn't. 
  Does it really do any kind of interop that would require a "native" 
Cygwin 64 port?

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