Hmm. Is there any point in supporting big endian CPUs in new software?

@ryanc s390x is basically the last one standing

@ryanc Do you want to start the Third Endian War? Cause questions like that are how you start the Third Endian War.

@ryanc How do you feel about MIPS?

@aschmitz 🖥️🤾🌋

@ariadne That sounds like "not worth my time".

@ryanc IBM is transitioning to aarch64 anyway.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ARM64-On-s390-IBM-Z-v2

@ariadne Well then!

@ryanc yeah. they're just doing it in a very IBM way.

@ariadne @ryanc ppc64 still has a big endian mode

@noisytoot @ryanc yes, and nobody cares about it.

@ariadne @ryanc except me, and people with older powerpc hardware

@noisytoot @ryanc yes, people who are not IBM's target customer

@ariadne @ryanc when I get my power9 server working I intend to use it to try to find and fix some big endian portability bugs (I will still use little endian on the host though for practical reasons, because I want a working web browser and GPU)

@noisytoot @ryanc you do that

@ariadne @noisytoot Power9 seems genuinely cool, but endianness bugs are some bullshit.

@ryanc @ariadne @noisytoot I use power9 and... Well... ppc64le. I believe it was added to support all the little endian linux stuff there is in power8. The cpu can run in either mode, i successfully ran some big endian vms just for fun.

I guess the answer isn't so much the software but what is the spec of what you're reading in.

@ryanc ... gonna have to remind myself if left and right shift operators on unsigned integers in c++ switch their numeric effect on values when running on big endian architectures.

if so, ohhhh I bet there are a ton of bugs out there.

@gsuberland @ryanc most of the PC code i write these days implicitly assumes little endian, 8 bit bytes, twos complement integers, and ieee754 floats.

Any platform that breaks with that baseline probably doesn't have working Vulkan and this isn't interesting to me :p

@gsuberland @ryanc realistically i have little time or motivation to support anything other than x86-64, aarch64, and maybe rv64 in the future