Support running on big-endian architectures

[Tachi107]

Hi, it seems that the VectorTest.Destructor test is failing on Debian's powerpc and powerpc64 architectures :/

I have not looked into the issue, but I guess that this might be related to ppc's big endianness.

You can find the logs for both here:

• https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=zycore-c&arch=powerpc
• https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=zycore-c&arch=ppc64

More generally, the build logs for all architectures are here: https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=zycore-c

[athre0z]

Yeah, big-endian is currently completely unsupported and this would require fixes all over the code-base. We'll have to introduce some endianess conversion helpers at some point and then go through the whole code-base. We usually left TODO comments where endianess is relevant, but there are likely also cases where such comments are missing. Given how rare BE has become in practice, I'm afraid this is not a high priority issue for us.

[Tachi107]

Oh ok, thanks for the fast reply! powerpc isn't an "official" Debian architecture, so this isn't really a big deal. Feel free to close this, or to keep it open as a kind of todo item :)

Edit: actually, one of Debian's official architectures is big endian, s390x. In any case, you can monitor Zycore's Debian status on https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=zycore-c (yeah, we have a lot of ports :)

[athre0z]

Cool. Let's leave this open as a low priority TODO item and as a reference for other people who are wondering about the BE support status. I adjusted the title to improve discoverability.