Forum
32-/64-Bit Controller DLLs
Hello David,
As already discussed before QBlade is currently accepting 64-bit controller DLLs only. Nevertheless, I would appreciate if you could also implement the handling of 32-bit controllers in the future, because it appears to be still quite common in the wind industry. I hope this is the right place for my “service request” – at least for me the topic would have been inappropriate in the “Bugs and Errors” thread.
Best regards
Tim
Hi Tim,
I remember our previous discussion, and it seems that this is a specific concern for commercial QB-EE users who work with older “legacy” controllers and lack access to their source code.
In contrast, the research community usually employs controllers compiled in 64-bit with full source code availability.
The challenge with addressing this issue lies in the incompatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit applications due to differences in memory models and data sizes across architectures. Fixing 32-bit DLLs without access to their source code necessitates mapping data and memory between 32-bit and 64-bit applications using inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. Although this approach is theoretically platform-independent for Linux and Windows, practical implementation often requires custom solutions on each operating system due to slight variations in features.
To tackle this, considerable development efforts would be required. However, we are going to to undertake this work if our commercial customers demand this feature. In fact, such endeavors can be beneficial in funding the work on these features, which could then also be released for the Community Edition of QBlade.
BR,
David
