x64 port - a diversion

Socket Servers, x64

The x64 port of The Server Framework is going well. I’ve run the tests for the OpenSSL servers and things are looking good there; this is always an important stage to get to for me as these servers and their tests really thrash the framework and are good at shaking out any bugs that might be hiding…

So, now I’m faced with the monkey work of adjusting all of the other example servers to build cleanly on all platforms and (in addition to the x64 work) to support either IPv4 or IPv6… My problem is that I now support 5 compilers; VC6 through VS2005 + x64 and, since both I and my clients like being able to work in the IDEs, this means 4 project files to maintain per example. Add to this the fact that when I test the example servers I build and run each of the 5 build configurations on each of the 5 compilers and you can start to realise the amount of work that’s ahead… Then when you add in the fact that on most compiler/platform combinations I support either the built in STL or STLPort (various flavours) and also like to be able to build against various flavours of Platform SDK and, well, it’s a lot of work…

I’m currently thinking about how to make this a bit easier to manage. I’m switching to VS2005 as my ’every day’ compiler which means I need to either manually maintain the other compiler’s project files or finally write the converter that I’ve been thinking about … Each of the server tests assumes it’s the only test running on the machine at the time (they all use the same port) and, besides, they thrash the box… But… I now have two dev boxes and a couple of laptops so a distributed build and test system would be nice, perhaps using VMWare…

So, right now, I’m thinking, and I’m sure that it’s best to solve these problems now, rather than plugging on with the monkey work by hand… So, if you’re in desperate need for the x64 version of The Server Framework then get in touch and I’m sure I can put together an interim release for you, but otherwise the official release date is likely to be some time from now…