Post #3788837
2026-07-12 18:34 UTC
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I have had a *lot* of bad experiences with software that blindly assumes CPU endianness is interchange endianness, enough that I'm tempted to burn that bit of instruction encoding space, just to force low level programmers to make an explicit decision up front.
The real counterargument is that for this to help you'd also have to force people to annotate the endianness of every non-register variable in every language besides assembly.
And still I think it might be worth it.
Replies (1)
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-13 08:21
@zwol@masto.hackers.town I don’t think that’s the right layer to solve this. As you say, to be useful it would require annotation in source languages and, if you have that, the compiler can insert byte swapping as required. Erlang, for example, does this very nicely.