[Pnet-developers] Use of ILNativeUInt vs. unsigned long in pointer casting and manipulation

[Peter Colson]

Greetings,

Having previously tried porting pnet to an environment that only 
supported 16 byte pointers that wouldn't allow casting and manipulation 
to/from integral types I now find myself in a later release of that 
environment that allows pointers to be represented as 8 byte entities 
that can be cast to/from integral types - in this case long long's.

All good so far.

However I've found differing instances in the pnet code of how this 
casting/manipulation is done.

Looking at engine/method_cache.c and it's Set/GetLeft/Right macros we 
see pointers being cast to ILNativeUInt's. This is good because the 
ILNative[U]Int typedefs resolve to 8 byte integrals.

In include/il_types.h, though, the various IL_TypeFrom/To macros use 
unsigned long as the intermediate type. This resolves to a 4 byte 
entity in my environment, so an obvious problem here.

When I look through the code I see other instances of, say, 
ILType_FromElement being used on a 'value' var that is returned as an 
unsigned long from ILMetaUncompressData().

My question is: How widespread is the use of unsigned long to 
hold/return pointers and wouldn't it be more portable to be using 
ILNativeUInt for this as per method_cache.c?

I'll keep reviewing the code, but am looking for a heads up from those 
with more widespread knowledge of the code.


Regards,
Peter Colson,