Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Gavin Lambert (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-27 20:58:47

On 28/01/2021 6:03 am, Edward Diener wrote:
>> Assumptions about alignment, endianness and overflow semantics and FP 
>> specifics are also not limited to lower level libraries and tend to 
>> crop up at any level.
> 
> Granted ! But I think that the vast majority of Boost libraries do not 
> deal in these issues. For the ones that do testing with different 
> platform/architecturs is important.

The size of int, long, pointers, size_t, and time_t (among others) are 
implementation-defined, as well as such common shortcuts as ((uint32_t) 
-1) assumed equivalent to 0xFFFFFFFFu (which is not guaranteed), and to 
some extent casting between signed and unsigned integers in general.

It's basically impossible to write any non-contrived C/C++ code that 
doesn't rely on implementation-defined behaviour *somewhere*.  As such 
it seems like a good idea to test on as many implementations as 
reasonably feasible.