Re:Ask HN: Is big-endian dead?
by macintux on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:53PM
(#16189712)
Many, many years ago I worked for Progeny, and we contracted with HP to help bring Debian to Itanium.
We quickly discovered that a fair bit of Linux software (or at least Debian packaging of same) only worked properly on 64-bit DEC Alpha because the architecture was Little Endian; 32-bit pointers would typically "just work(™)" because the code was grabbing the first 32 bits, and the other half of the pointer addresses was typically 0x0.
Since we were porting to Big Endian hardware (just now discovered Itanium was selectable, not sure why it was Big Endian in our case) we were getting a fair bit of null pointer exceptions.
Anyway, ancient history, but that was my only direct exposure to endian-madness, so it has stuck with me.
We quickly discovered that a fair bit of Linux software (or at least Debian packaging of same) only worked properly on 64-bit DEC Alpha because the architecture was Little Endian; 32-bit pointers would typically "just work(™)" because the code was grabbing the first 32 bits, and the other half of the pointer addresses was typically 0x0.
Since we were porting to Big Endian hardware (just now discovered Itanium was selectable, not sure why it was Big Endian in our case) we were getting a fair bit of null pointer exceptions.
Anyway, ancient history, but that was my only direct exposure to endian-madness, so it has stuck with me.