"prohibitively" depends on your tolerance. Modern machines can usually do register-to-register byte order reversal rather speedily. Which big endian machines do you have in mind?
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:51 AM, Andreas Rossberg <[email protected]>wrote: > On 27 March 2013 00:35, David Herman <[email protected]> wrote: > > [breaking out a new thread since this is orthogonal to the NaN issue] > > > > While the Khronos spec never specified an endianness, TC39 agreed in May > 2012 to make the byte order explicitly little-endian in ES6: > > > > https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-May/022834.html > > > > The de facto reality is that there are essentially no big-endian > browsers for developers to test on. Web content is being invited to > introduce byte-order dependencies. DataView is usually held up as the > counter-argument, as if the *existence* of a safe alternative API means no > one will ever misuse the unsafe one. Even if we don't take into account > human nature, Murphy's Law, and the fact that the web is the world's > largest fuzz tester, a wholly rational developer may often prefer not to > use DataView because it's still easier to read out bytes using [ ] notation > instead of DataView methods. > > > > I myself -- possibly the one person in the world who cares most about > this issue! -- accidentally created a buggy app that wouldn't work on a > big-endian system, because I had no way of testing it: > > > > > https://github.com/dherman/float.js/commit/deb5bf2f5696ce29d9a6c1a6bf7c479a3784fd7b > > > > In summary: we already agreed on TC39 to close this loophole, it's the > right thing to do, and concern about potential performance issues on > non-existent browsers of non-existent systems should not trump portability > and correctly executing existing web content. > > I missed that decision, and as much as I understand the reasoning, I > think we need to work on it. There actually are (third-party) projects > with ports of V8 and/or Chromium to big endian architectures. WebGL > code should not break or become prohibitively expensive on them all of > a sudden. > > /Andreas > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss > -- Cheers, --MarkM
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