Re: [boost] int64_t with MSVC 7.1 & 'strict' /Za option

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-29 07:33:07

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:35:57 +0100, Paul A. Bristow wrote
> Trying to use boost/date-time in MSVC 7.1 in 'strict' mode option 
> /Za 'disable language extensions' it seems that
> 
> boost::int64_t isn't available.
> 
> After a journey through the labryinthine config modules, I have got compiling
> with
> 
> #define BOOST_HAS_MS_INT64 // required if language extensions disabled /Za.
> 
> as the first statement.
> 
> but I am unclear if this is a deficiency in either boost/cstdint and/or
> date-time/compiler_config.hpp
> 
> or in my understanding of the MS option
> 
> but it might be worth documenting somewhere, perhaps as a comment in
> cstdint.hpp?

I'm not an expert on the VC options, but it seems that if the user is flagging
us that we shouldn't use any language extensions then we should honor that. 
So I would accept that it is a bug in date-time that it doesn't offer an
option to configure without int64_t.  One other user has brought this issue
up, but it hasn't been high enough on my priority list as the library runs
well on a large set of platforms and removal of int64_t from the core will
surely slow things down (especially with 64 bit processors getting cheap :-)
So I recommend the following in steps:

1) Will define BOOST_HAS_MS_INT64 in date-time/compiler_config for now
2) Will document that this extension is used in the date-time docs
3) Will in the future provide options to use date-time without int64_t

And I agree that a note in cstdint.hpp might be nice too.

Jeff