Re: [PATCH] PR 78534 Change character length from int to size_t

[Thomas Koenig <tkoenig at netcologne dot de>]

Hi Janne,

> To be honest, I haven't really done much testing with big strings, so
> far my focus has been on getting the existing testsuite to pass and
> getting the ABI right.

I agree that some of the test cases can be fixed later. However, I
would really prefer if the I/O worked, because that is very basic
functionality, but also because this is (likely to be) an ABI issue.
If this bug remains unfixed for any reason at all, then we are left with
no choice but to break the ABI when we fix that bug. I would like to
avoid that, if possible.

By the way, we also should forsee a few more ABI-breaking things
while we're at it. We should

- Put a "reserved" field in the array descriptor for things like
  "did this come from an ALLOCATE statement or not", there is a PR
  for this
- Put a pointer to void into the I/O structures, which we are certain
  to need for async I/O
- Increase the maximum number of array dimensions to 15, as per f2008
- Insert a "BACK" argument in minloc, maxloc, minval, maxval, even
  if we do not use it at the moment

> As the library ABI has been broken for GCC 8
> already by other changes, I'd like to piggyback this ABI change in for
> the GCC 8 release as well. As the patch is already pretty big as is,
> I'd prefer that other fixes to enable big strings would be done as
> separate patches rather than trying to make everything perfect on the
> first try.

I tend to concur for the other bugs, but not for the I/O issue.

Regards

	Thomas