> Why on earth would I want this compile-time code to run on an emulated version of the target platform? If I’m on a 64-bit platform then pointers are 8-bytes why would I pretend they aren’t? Even if the target is 32-bit? Does that make sense?
Nope, sorry, to me it doesn't. If you're cross-compiling for some other platform, then yes, I'd think you want the generated binary to be compatible with the target platform. And in order to verify that that binary code is correct for that target platform, you need to "allocate some memory and have some pointers and do some stuff" as you do on that platform.
So why on Earth would you want stuff -- like pointer sizes and whatnot -- to not be compatible with the target platform, but with whatever you happen to be compiling on? What good is pointer size compatibility with your compiling platform to a user of your end-result binary on the target platform? Looks like the mother of all it-worked-on-my-machine statements: "Whaddaya mean it has memory allocation errors on your machine? I ran it as if for my totally-different machine at compile-time, so of course it works on yours!"
Nope, sorry, to me it doesn't. If you're cross-compiling for some other platform, then yes, I'd think you want the generated binary to be compatible with the target platform. And in order to verify that that binary code is correct for that target platform, you need to "allocate some memory and have some pointers and do some stuff" as you do on that platform.
So why on Earth would you want stuff -- like pointer sizes and whatnot -- to not be compatible with the target platform, but with whatever you happen to be compiling on? What good is pointer size compatibility with your compiling platform to a user of your end-result binary on the target platform? Looks like the mother of all it-worked-on-my-machine statements: "Whaddaya mean it has memory allocation errors on your machine? I ran it as if for my totally-different machine at compile-time, so of course it works on yours!"