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At what point will all big-endian usage be just developers testing big-endian with no users to use the results, and at what point shall we stop even testing? (
by hsivonen 9y ago
At what point will all big-endian usage be just developers testing big-endian with no users to use the results, and at what point shall we stop even testing?
(Yesterday, I finally got around to making encoding_rs work on 64-bit big-endian systems by testing PPC64 in qemu. Then I timed out trying to get a 32-bit big-endian system with recent enough glibc to run Rust up and running in qemu, so I still haven't tested the 32-bit case... Unclear if anyone even cares.)
- gsnedders 9y agoWith IBM's huge investment in better support for little-endian PPC (in hardware, in software development toolchains, and in software itself) it seems likely that many PPC users are going to slowly move away from little-endian. I can imagine some embedded uses, e.g. in network hardware, may well stick with big-endian because it fundamentally makes sense there, but I imagine it's going to become increasingly obscure.
- gsnedders 9y agoMy above comment is of course wrong, they're going to move away from big-endian to little-endian. Pretty sure I changed what I was saying half-way through. :)
- TD-Linux 9y agoMIPS is the other large big-endian case that's still in wide use (especially in home routers), however the machines are even more painfully slow to test on.
- faragon 9y agoMost MIPS CPUs can run both BE and LE (MIPS-LE), although is usually tied to the kind of applications (e.g. most MIPS routers run in big endian mode)