PR# 2628 Need support for large files (> 2 GB)

In the not too distant future (possibly in as little as 6 months)
we will need to be able to read and write large files in an Eiffel
application.  Large files are files greater than 2 GB.  We are in
the process of upgrading to Solaris 7, so that the operating system
will be able to support large files.  We won't have too many of these
files at first, but it is very important that we be able to handle them.

We would like to find out when ISE Eiffel programs will be able to
read and write files greater than 2 GB in size on Solaris.  One
way to achieve this is to generate 64-bit executables, which can
access large files by default.  Is it
sufficient to have a C compiler than compiles for SPARCV9 or does
the Eiffel run-time also have to be compiled with such a C compiler to
produce 64-bit executables? (I suspect the latter)

Moved to proper category.

Adding interaction for testing.

Will Eiffel ever support files bigger than 2 GB?  We have been working
around this issue for the last 10 years by maintaining our own set of
large file classes.  We copied FILE, PLAIN_TEXT_FILE, RAW_FILE, DIRECTORY and
UNIX_FILE_INFO and all of their ancestor classes into files named
LARGE_FILE, etc.  We then changed every INTEGER that might need to be
large to INTEGER_64 and also changed a few references to FILE* classes to
their LARGE_FILE* counterparts.  We also had to copy part of file.c and
create "large" routines with new names starting with "large_" to support
large files.

This works but has several disadvantages:

1. Every time we get a new release, I have to manually compare all of the
   classes to pick up any changes, including comparison of the C code.
   This is particularly painful because I have to be careful to keep
   code that is intentionally different, so that it works correctly for
   large files.  It is also quite time consuming and error-prone.

2. There is of course 
....
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State-Changed-From-To: open-analyzed
State-Changed-By: Manu
State-Changed-When: Tue Aug 22 11:57:57 PDT 2000
State-Changed-Why:

Dear David,

For the moment, ie using 4.5, it is not possible. When the next version
will be available, we will have a support for INTEGER_64 meaning that
you can use the API that is required to access large file.

If the API is only available when compiling for SPARCV9, we will also
need to do a special port of the run-time. In that case we need access
to a Solaris 7 machine which have this option.

Let me know if you need more info.