I see, nice information, thanks. But what I can do for pointers I can't for values. That's right. Pointer casting exists only in the compiler at compile-time. Pointer dereferencing and type coercion is at runtime, however. Except that you want to coerce a value into a string, which isn't ever fast....

On Linux with the GCC backend, the CPtr() cast function collapses down to a series of C casts, which are compile-time only, and thus free. In other words CPtr isn't really a function, and thus has no performance cost.

Those colors do look nice! Interesting how a nice color scheme can make it so much more comfortable on the eyes. In ancient times it was just green or amber on a dark screen and we thought that was pretty good! I think programmers have always preferred dark backgrounds until Visual Studio forced bri...

I'm a weird one and I prefer the old IBM BIOS VGA font. I use it for all my programming editors. Even at a real pixel size of 8x16, it's very crisp and readable on a 1080p screen. I like the weight of the font. It's just easy on my eyes. I use a TTF version called Less Perfect VGA . At 12 pts it is ...

That's very odd that dylibsymbol can't find that symbol. Your read of the Python code is correct. Did you try running the python code on the same machine as your FB version? Does it run at all or does it also give an error trying to find that symbol? Is there a utility somewhere that can open and DL...

I think you're seeing some incompatibilities between the version of Mingw or Visual Studio that compiled libcurl, and your version of the MingW compiler/linker suite. I suspect it's something to do with changes to MS C runtime. But that's as far as I've got. At a low level I think MS changed some of...

What is in the future, more complex and mega-large OS programs, yes, that includes Linux along with Windows. And where does FreeBasic fit in this scenario? FB is already fairly successful on Windows and Linux, so I really don't see much changing as far as that goes. Sure things are more complex now...

ARM is also able to run in big endian or little endian but most ARM systems are running in little endian mode. I'm not sure if this is set by the OS during boot loading, or if it's burned into the chip somehow.

Since the majority of computers on the planet , use AMD or Intel processors.. You would think the coders would make the *ptr to be the endian style of the majority.. Are the coders coding for Sun Sparcs? The only way to make the bytes look like you think they should in memory is to use a big-endian...

I know that there is very little activity or interest around DOS, at this time, but it seems to me that if it were updated, maybe it could pick up some interest again. Or maybe not. I am interested in the simplicity of DOS, but I am also interested in the GUI aspect of an OS. I wonder how complicat...

So the primary goal of an OS, is to access the WWW? How very, euh, Chome ! :-) Pretty much! Gets even worse when you add in IoT ideas that everything should be connected just because. At that point, even programs running on single-tasking, bare-metal chips like Atmel can be vulnerable to outside at...

But while multiuser is good for a server OS, I'm not 100% sure it is an absolute requirement for a desktop OS. Unix and NT both come from the server side, so are bad examples in this regard. I'm not sure about that. Unix was originally an evolution/competitor of the interactive, time-slice multiuse...

If your cpanel shows it disabled, then I'm guessing the hosting provider is running it at a higher level. I've never been a fan of rechaptcha, or any chaptchas really. They are horrible solutions to a difficult problem. Lately I've found I trip the robot checks a lot on various sites, and I wonder i...

Right. So far it happened just once, thank goodness. I've seen this on several other web sites I visit lately, so I wonder if there's something about my configuration that's triggering it. When I checked into Immunify360 I read that it uses machine learning to identify and block attacks. That tells ...

So today I got blocked trying to access the forum by a warning about unusual activity from my IP address and I had to take those infuriating robot tests. Can the forum administrators do anything to figure out why Immunify360 was blocking me? It would be helpful to know what's triggering the block an...