🚀 go-pugleaf

<Donut> wrote:

> Questions :
>     How to check in C++ program if our applciation running on a
> Big/Little/Bi Endian machine?
>     Is there a generic way of transforming data (which could be in any
> structure) between different endians?

Others will know much better than myself as to how you can detect the endian
of the machine you are executing in: best to wait for more replies on that.

I am writing from the perspective of a hardware engineer; one of the
projects I worked on was providing conversion in hardware between multiple
processors of differing endian.  Maybe the technology has moved on with
specialized protocols for this purpose that I don't know about, but :-

There are two main issues with moving data between endian's: firstly
preservation of canonical byte ordering of strings and secondly,
preservation of integer integrity (and other numeric types).  If the
process of conversion is unaware of the structure of data passed, then one
or the other of these can be preserved but not both.  This is because the
processor can arbitarily read locations in byte or word mode.

To preserve both you will need to be fully aware of the exact structure of
the data passed and write a dedicated conversion of your own to convert
each data item according to type.