On 2022-07-18 at 12:18:14, Derrick Stolee wrote:
> On 7/18/22 7:48 AM, Abhradeep Chakraborty wrote:
> > I just got to know that CRoaring doesn't support Big Endian systems (till now) -
> > 
> > https://groups.google.com/g/roaring-bitmaps/c/CzLmIRnYlps
> > 
> > What do you think about this?
> 
> Git cares enough about compatibility that that might be a
> deal-breaker for taking the code as-is. If we _did_ take it
> as-is, then we would need to not make it available on such
> machines using compiler macros.

Debian definitely targets big-endian systems and the Debian maintainer
will likely not be amused if functionality differs across systems.  That
tends to add a bunch of hassle to the maintenance process and ends up
resulting in bug reports and a poor user experience.

I certainly strongly feel that our code should be fully functional
across all architectures that make POSIX-compatible assumptions,
including big-endian systems.  I've ported code to make it work on
UltraSPARC before (for endianness and alignment) and it isn't usually
too hard to fix things, so we likely be able to ship code that's
portable.

In addition, we also need to consider that other systems like NetBSD,
Dragonfly BSD, and OpenBSD are not supported upstream, and thus we will
likely need to patch the code anyway.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA