On 3/28/12 2:04 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
Consider a big-endian platform where both the CPU and the GPU is
big-endian. If a webpage writes 16bit data into an ArrayBuffer and
then sends that off to the GPU using WebGL, the data had better be
sent in big-endian otherwise the GPU will interpret it wrong.
However if the same page then writes some 16bit data into an
ArrayBuffer and then looks at its individual bytes or send it across
the network to a server, it's very likely that the data needs to
appear as little-endian or site logic might break.
Basically I don't know how one would write a modern browser on a
big-endian system.
What one could do is to store the array buffer bytes always as little
endian, and then if sending to the GPU byte-swap as needed based on the
API call being used (and hence the exact types the GPU actually expects).
So basically, make all JS-visible state always be little-endian, and
deal in the one place where you actually need native endianness.
I believe that was substantially Robert's proposal earlier in this thread.
-Boris
