Bigger pointers == More traction!!

Start off with a joke... Isn't that what they recommend? This particular joke stems from when Seattle ended up covered in snow this past January and it seemed that for whatever reason the CLR 64bit team were the only people who ended up working in our end of the building... Everyone else was smarter and just took the day off.

Anyway, my name is Josh Williams, I've been working on the 64bit CLR since I joined MS a bit over a year ago (before that I spent a few years working for Intel on various things). Work on the 64bit CLR has been going on however since long before I joined the team, way back to right around when v1.0 was released I believe. Hopefully I can convince a couple other people on the 64bit team to also chime in here from time to time (Thomas, Scott... you know you want to!!).

BradA suggested that I kick this thing off after I contributed a couple comments to a thread on his blog, to which I replied that though I think it an interesting idea the list of things that I think people out there will actually be interested in are fairly small. That original list included:

- Pitfalls of PInvoke when moving to 64bit platforms

- CLR in the WOW64

- GAC on 64bit platforms

- Performance running managed code on 64bit platforms (both in and out of the WOW64)

- Debugging on 64bit (Managed/Native)

- JIT64 and its differences from the x86 JIT

I'll try to get to most of those topics over the next month or two, but hopefully the readers out there can help me out and tell me what they're really interested in learning about the 64bit CLR. BradA has already tried to put out a feeler and so far it seems to show that the people want to hear about WOW64, so I'll aim my next (read: first real) post there!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2004
  Look forward to learning more about CLR64 ... particularly the pitfalls of PInvoke. My $.02 ... you gotta use PInvoke now to do some things either on both WinCE and W2K/XP that you can't do from the framework.
  
  I'd be happy to provide an evolving list of APIs that I use (actually a tiny subset of the W32 apis) so that, hopefully 1) an automatic thunking layer can be provided and 2) warnings can be introduced into the development tools.
  
  FYI, way back when, I helped lead the team on transitioning from W16 to W32 (x86, Alpha, MIPS) for a suite of products. That was about 12 years ago ... conventional wisdom then was that the 32 -> 64 bit transition would to have occured 5 years ago ;-)
• Anonymous
  March 11, 2004
  Since most managed code without unsafe or PInvoke will port effortlessly (yes?), how about an entry about porting unsafe code to 64bit. The most common unsafe code in C# seems to be bitmap manipulation code (necessary for speed). Will that change? Other gotchas?
• Anonymous
  March 11, 2004
  Frank: I agree... One of the reasons I was origianlly hesitant about starting this blog is that it is fundamentally not all that hard to port managed code to 64bit if its fully managed and safe. Given that, what's there to talk about?
  
  I figure that the more interesting problems to talk about are the weird cases and the foundation of the 64bit platform itself (both Windows and CLR). So for now that's what I'm aiming to do. Unsafe code definitely can fall into that bucket.
  
  I'll make a point to add bitmap manipulation code to my list of things to talk about.