More on the OO 64-bit source

[Graham Gower]

On 29 October 2010 08:00, Jim McCarthy <jkmccarthy at pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> Note there is also an officially supported Itanium 64-bit (ia64) release of the latest OpenOffice.   I do not have much depth of C-programming experience myself, but one of the people working on Itanium support + development of the Red-Hat-based "Scientific Linux CERN" Linux OS once mentioned to me that ia64 was a more "stringent" (or strict) 64-bit implementation than 64-bit x86.  His experience was such that source code upgraded from 32-bit x86 to 64-bit x86 was not necessarily guaranteed to be up-to-snuff for building "as is" on ia64 -- i.e., some additional 64-bit upgrades to the source code are frequently required in order to build the code successfully on ia64.   Conversely 32-bit source code upgraded to adhere to the stricter 64-bit demands for building on ia64 were then fine building "as is" on 64-bit x86.
>
> I can't say whether this is indeed true, or not -- and if true, whether the existence of an Itanium release of OpenOffice has anything to do with getting those same source codes to build successfully on 64-bit Alpha platforms -- but I thought it was an interesting claim that one could apparently get away with certain legacy 32-bit programming practices on 64-bit x86 that were strictly forbidden on ia64.
>
> -- Jim
>

In terms of the code being useful on a big endian, 64bit, strict
alignment architecture; sparc64 has been supported for some time.

-Graham