In order to assist in the portability problem with the application and to allow retrieval of the integral thread id, the AS/400 implementation has provided the pthread_getunique_np() function to retrieve the integral thread id from the Pthread handle. This integral thread id is actually a 64 bit integer value. Since some compilers do not yet support a full 64 bit integer data type, the value is returned in a structure containing two 4 byte integers.