Re: pid_t on 64-bit Windows

[Martin Oberzalek <martin.oberzalek@ssi-schaefer.com>]

Hi Bruno,

> Your email is hardly readable, because

I'm sorry for that. I hope it is fixed now.

> > _spawnvp(), or _wspawnvp() are not returning a pid. It is a process handle.
> 
> No one claimed that _spawnvp() is returning a pid.

What I wan't to point out is that in gnulib on WIN32 API pid_t is not a process id 
like it is on linux. Functions in gnulib that are using pid_t eg waitpid() accepting
a process handle instead.

I'm using parity[1] in an gentoo prefix environment to compile in linux like style
win32 as win64 applications. 

parity is a wrapper around the visual stdio compiler and it defines pid_t as int.
Because getpid() return also int. And GetCurrentProcessId() as well.

So if I compile a project that is using gnulib I might get a compiler error because
of the different definition of pid_t. (In best case. Depending on the situation, the
programm will simple crash)

For my use case a better solution would be a compile time test in the configure script
that tests the existance of pid_t.

Another solution would be not using pid_t in gnulib at all. Just redefining it in a way like

#if ( defined(_WIN64) || _defined(_WIN32) ) && !defined(__CYGWIN__)
intprt_t GNULIB_PID_HANDLE
#else
pid_t GNULIB_PID_HANDLE
#endif

What do you think?

Martin

[1] https://github.com/mduft/parity