🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently started porting some data structure libraries I wrote on Unix
to the PC under Windows 3.1.  I'm using Borland C++ 3.1.

I naively assumed that all of the segmented memory issues would be
more or less transparent to me and that the compiler would take care
of pointer conversions, alignment problems, etc.  I figured if I
compiled my code with the Compact option, my pointer declarations
would be interpreted as far pointers and that I could address within a
1 Mb address space without changing a bit of my code.  This doesn't
_seem_ to work, though I just started and still don't know very much
about the 80x86.

So, if this doesn't work, what is the best way to write code portable to
80x86 architectures -- both under DOS and in Windows programs and DLLs?

I realize with a little research and a lot of #ifdefs I could write some
portable code but it would be extremely useful to be able to hide the
PC-specific code from the programmer using malloc().  Has somebody put
some sort of library together?

Alternatively, is it possible to simply call GlobalAlloc() or whatever
the function is to allocate memory from Windows global heap, convert the handle
to a far/huge pointer (the pointer declarations somehow declared this way
implicitly), lock the memory then when you're done with it, convert the
pointer back to a handle, unlock and free it?  This seems like sensible
behavior -- assuming that this doesn't force Windows to keep in memory
stuff that should it should be able to move and swap in/out.

As a programmer, it doesn't seem like I should have to deal with the
quirks of the processor I'm running on...

My understanding of the 386/486 is that it has better support for virtual
memory management and that its virtual 32-bit pointers look like contiguous,
unmoving addressable memory.  Is there a way to do this in Borland C++ 3.1?
Judging from some of the other posts about memory management, it seems that
a lot of people might benefit from discussing some of the stuff I've
brought up.  If this is FAQ material, I'm sorry for clogging network
bandwith with this message.

Drew


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Andrew Kompanek                        e-mail: drew@chimera.hgen.pitt.edu,
Department of Human Genetics                  ak10@andrew.cmu.edu,
University of Pittsburgh                      kompanek@cs.cmu.edu
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