Ready for testing: architecture independent .QLF and boot files

[Jan Wielemaker]

Hi,

I've uploaded some patches to the development version after the
struggles by erlanger dealing with cross-compilation that makes .qlf
files and saved states (they use the same format) independent from the
architecture. They used to be byte-order independent, although that too
was no longer the case for unbounded integers or wide strings (strings
with char codes >= 256).

The current format is both truely byte-order indendent, but also
word-size independent (32 vs 64-bit). It is still Prolog version
dependent. That might be relaxed for future versions.

Erlanger is working on supporting multiple architectures for foreign
plugins in a saved state, which would allow packaging complete
applications for different archicitectures as a single state. Running
that state does still require a swipl binary compiled for the target
architecture of course.

If you rely on saved states or QLF and/or want to explore the
possibilities, please test the current git version.

Enjoy --- Jan

[Paulo Moura]

Hi Jan,

This is great news :-) I did a quick test using Logtalk's embedding support for SWI-Prolog, which uses QLF files and saved states, on macOS. No issues with 8.1.0-26-g25ac7731f.

Cheers,
Paulo

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Paulo Moura
Logtalk developer