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Designing software for hypothetical future which is very unlikely to happen is a classic case of overengineering. Little-endian platforms have won, very few pe
by Const-me 4y ago
Designing software for hypothetical future which is very unlikely to happen is a classic case of overengineering.
Little-endian platforms have won, very few people are targeting MIPS, power or SPARC processors these days. Technically some ARM CPUs are bi-endian, but practically all operating systems people run on them are only supporting little-endian mode. GPUs are little-endian as well.
- Retr0id 4y agoBE systems aren't a hypothetical future, they're here in the present, in production systems. Yes, they're not very common, but that only makes the edge-cases sharper. The overengineering argument would make sense for a specific implementation, but not for the format as a whole, IMHO.
- Const-me 4y agoIt’s not a database format, it’s an image format. They are typically used in conjunction with a graphical display capable of rendering these images. I don’t think many of these legacy BE systems have such a thing. AFAIK most of these systems are headless: supercomputers with Power10, networking equipment, old SPARC servers, etc.
- circuit10 4y agoI’m developing things for a big-endian architecture at the moment (making games and things for my Casio calculator using SuperH)