From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 9/22/2025 7:03 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:57:42 +1200, David Goodwin wrote:   
   >> Windows 2000 was to introduce new VLM APIs that allow 32bit applications   
   >> on Alpha to access very large amounts of memory.   
   >   
   > There’s a reason the API is still called “Win32”, not “Win64”.   
   Instead of   
   > using POSIX-style symbolic type names like size_t, time_t and off_t, they   
   > explicitly use 32-bit types.   
   >   
   > This leads to craziness like, when getting the size of a file, it returns   
   > the high half and low half in separate 32-bit quantities, even on a 64-bit   
   > system, with native 64-bit integer support!   
      
   There are two aspects here.   
      
   1) types that have different sizes on different   
       platforms/compilers/configs vs types that have   
       same sizes on all platforms/compilers/configs   
      
   Experience shows that the latter is better than the   
   former, because it makes it easier to write portable   
   code with well defined behavior.   
      
   off_t is a signed integer of unknown size.   
      
   DWORD is always 32 bit.   
      
   2) use of two 32 bit integers vs one 64 bit integer   
       on a platform/compiler that supports 64 bit integers   
      
   Obviously it is nicer to have one 64 bit integer.   
      
   Win32 API GetFileSizeEx return one 64 bit integer (and   
   two 32 bit integers via a union), but GetFileAttributesEx   
   return two 32 bit integers.   
      
   The last one may have been tricky to fix because they got   
   the two bit integers in the wrong order: high before low.   
      
   Arne   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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