On Friday, 12 March 2021 at 05:53:40 UTC, Preetpal wrote:
In the portability section of the language spec, they talk
about endianness
(https://dlang.org/spec/portability.html#endianness) which
refers "to the order in which multibyte types are stored." IMO
if you wanted to actually be sure your code is portable across
both big endian and little endian systems, you should actually
run your code on both types of systems and test if there any
issues.
The problem is that I am not aware of any big-endian systems
that you can actually test on and if there is any D lang
compiler support for any of these systems if they exist.
This is not an important issue to me but I was just curious to
see if anyone actually tests for portability issues related to
endianness by compiling their D Lang code for a big endian
architecture and actually running it on that system.
Actual big endian systems? Not many around anymore:
- SPARC almost dead
- IBM z/system still around and not going away but a D
implementation not very likely as it adds the other difficulty
that it is not ASCII but EBCDIC.
- AVR32 doesn't look very vivid.
- Freescale Coldfire (as successor of 68K) also on a descending
path
- OpenRISC superseded by RISC-V
Some CPU can do both but are generally used in little endian mode
(ARM, Power) or also obsolete (Alpha, IA64).
While from an intellectual perspective endiannes support is a
good thing, from a pure pragmatic vue it is a solved issue.
Little endian won, definitely (except on the network in the
TCP/IP headers).
