Code Portability Pitfalls

Code Portability Pitfalls

Most of the low-level arithmetic code for AI algorithms looks quite standardized. Well, not so much. The general areas where C++ code that looks standard is actually non-portable includes trappy issues such as:

• Data type byte sizes (e.g. how many bytes is an “int”).
• Arithmetic overflow of integers or float operators.
• Integer operators and negatives (e.g. % and >> operators).
• Floating-point oddities (e.g. negative zero, Inf, and NaN).
• Divide-by-zero doesn't always crash.
• Pointer versus integer sizes (e.g. do void pointers fit inside an int?).
• Endian-ness of integer byte storage (i.e. do you prefer “big endian” or “little endian”?).
• Zero bytes versus zero integers.
• Order of evaluation of expression operands (e.g. with side-effects).

And there are various other portability issues arising at a higher-level than the AI arithmetic data processing, such as the inputs and outputs of the program. Problematic areas include:

• Text files (e.g. '\n' on Linux versus '\r\n' on Windows).
• UTF8 versus Latin1 encodings (e.g. for tokenization).
• Unicode special characters (e.g., Asian languages or unicorn emojis).
• EBCDIC versus ASCII (character-level problems in tokens).
• Operating system accesses (e.g. processes and file permissions).
• Signal handling (low-level).

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