leerho commented on issue #28:
URL:
https://github.com/apache/datasketches-rust/issues/28#issuecomment-3666603362
This is a library-wide check placed in two classes in /common/ that every
sketch in the library will likely call: Family and Util.
There are several reasons for this check:
- There are a number of sketches that use compression algorithms that are
byte-order sensitive and will fail if the machine's byte-order is BE.
Attempting to re-write these algorithms to handle BE would be quite painful and
is very low in priority AFAIAC.
- All of the binary serialization images assume LE. And these images are
intended to be interpreted cross-language and cross-platform.
- Intel, because of it dominance early on, pretty much won the battle of LE
vs BE and LE became the default many years ago and is still true today -- even
though modern CPUs can handle LE or BE pretty transparently, the default is
still LE.
- Yes there are still BE CPUs out there but they are rare and especially
rare in large platforms that process big data, which is primarily our target.
- One notable exception to this dominance of LE is TCP/IP, which uses BE for
the headers, but the payloads are endian insensitive, they are just blobs of
bytes. (this is because TCP/IP was developed in the 1970's).
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