Friday, April 21 2006 @ 01:31 AM EDT Contributed by: sde
With the pervasiveness of 64-bit architectures, it's more important than ever that your Linux® software be 64-bit ready. Learn how to avoid portability pitfalls when making declarations and assignments, bit shifting, typing, formatting strings, and more.
Linux was one of the first cross-platform operating systems to use 64-bit processors, and now 64-bit systems are becoming commonplace in servers and desktops. Many developers are now facing the need to port applications from 32-bit to 64-bit environments. With the introduction of Intel® Itanium® and other 64-bit processors, making software 64-bit-ready has become increasingly important.
As with UNIX® and other UNIX-like operating systems, Linux uses the LP64 standard, where pointers and long integers are 64 bits but regular integers remain 32-bit entities. Although some high-level languages are not affected by the size differences, others such as the C language may be.
