[tor-dev] building from source in a 64-bit windows environment..

[Zack Weinberg]

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 12:50 AM, not me <anemenja at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Look more closely at those libevent headers: this is only the case on Windows.  Yeah, it's at least arguably wrong, but it's not interfering with
>> anyone else.
>
> why on earth anyone thought this was a good idea ever is beyond me.
> Even if we consider a 32-bit box with an OS that doesn't exist that
> allows me to approach 4B+ file descriptors open, we'd run out of
> address space trying to handle all of the data associated with each
> file.

We don't do this to increase the number of possible file descriptors
that Tor can have open at the same time.  We do it because under the
hood Windows socket descriptors are kernel HANDLEs, thus *not* small
positive integers, thus this part of winsock2.h:

/*
 * The new type to be used in all
 * instances which refer to sockets.
 */
#ifdef _WIN64
typedef UINT_PTR        SOCKET;
#else
typedef u_int           SOCKET;
#endif

Ironically this appears to be one of the places where we *are* trying
for Win64 compatibility.

Nick is probably right about why you're getting truncation errors over this.

zw