Hum. So, searching the mailing list archives, I find several people reporting that compiling ChucK on any 64-bit platform segfaults immediately on startup due to assumptions about type widths. This is also my experience. This should be unsurprising to me by now, but apparently I can still be toppled over backwards by this sort of stuff, so pardon me if I flame somewhat. I'm not going to ask for a fix date or anything like that. I'd love to fix it myself, ideally, though I have no idea whether I'll have a chance to do that. What I will ask, however, is _why_? I see no response to this in any of the earlier threads (possibly because nobody asked), only vague rumblings about "it doesn't work on 64-bit machines yet; we're still working on it". Which assumptions is ChucK making about type widths, and why is it making them? A cursory inspection of the source seems to indicate that someone decided long must be four bytes on every machine and happily hardcoded it everywhere, thus making it almost impossible to dig the all-the-world's-an-i386 syndrome out now that it's sunk so deep into the VM and such. Is that what it is, or is it something else? Are there other similar nonportable assumptions (aside from the stuff that's actually demarcated as platform-specific)? What compels people to not use mechanisms like sizeof for this sort of thing? I don't see anything doing fancy enough tricks to legitimately depend on assumptions like that. I'm honestly stunned. I decided to try ChucK instead of SuperCollider because SuperCollider stupidly assumes it can stuff a void * into an int, which makes it not compile on my machine, so I immediately gave up on it. I was getting my hopes up because ChucK at least compiled, but now I find that a similar form of bogosity will probably destroy any reasonable chance at that too. At any rate, it would be nice to check at compilation-configuration time, or even at process initialization time, that all the sizes fit whatever constraints they're required to fit, and then bomb in a well-defined manner if they don't. There being no obvious compilation-configuration stage seems to make the former possibility into more of a mess than it should be, of course, so meh. ---> Drake Wilson