[vtk-developers] Fwd: vtk 64 bit support

[Sean McBride]

On Thu, 16 May 2013 08:58:16 -0600, David Gobbi said:

>I've been fixing 64-bit bugs in VTK more-or-less continuously for
>years, most recently in the volume ray cast mapper classes just a
>few months ago.  I suspect that much of VTK is 64-bit safe by now,
>but I'm sure that bugs remain.  Being able to compile and run code
>on a 64-bit machine does not mean the code is 64-bit safe.

I guess it all depends what one means by '64-bit safe'.  It's been a long while since I've seen VTK truncate *memory addresses* from 64 to 32 bit, or screw up 64 bit pointer arithmetic.  But where bugs very likely remain is where you try to work with more than 2^32 'things', that's bound to go wrong (in some cases), as evidenced by the number of 64-to-32 bit truncation warnings that remain (ex: long->int downcasts).

I use VTK almost exclusively with void* == 64 bit, but rarely work with more that 2^32 'things'.

Cheers,

-- 
____________________________________________________________
Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com 
Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada