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The C23 edition of Modern C

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515 points bwidlar | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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eqvinox ◴[16 Oct 24 12:54 UTC] No.41858531[source]▶
> The storage order, the endianness, as given for my machine, is called little-endian. A system that has high-order representation digits first is called big-endian. Both orders are commonly used by modern processor types. Some processors are even able to switch between the two orders on the fly.

Calling big endian "commonly used by modern processor types" when s390x is really the only one left is a bit of a stretch ;D

(Comments about everyone's favorite niche/dead BE architecture in 3… 2… 1…)

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1. skissane ◴[17 Oct 24 04:50 UTC] No.41866505[source]▶
> Calling big endian "commonly used by modern processor types" when s390x is really the only one left is a bit of a stretch ;D

POWER is bi-endian. In recent versions, Linux on POWER is little-endian (big-endian Linux on POWER used to be popular, until all the distros switched some years back), while AIX and IBM i are big-endian.

AIX and IBM i are probably not quite as alive as IBM mainframes are, but AIX is still arguably more alive than Solaris or HP/UX are, to say nothing of the dozens of other commercial Unix systems that once existed. Likewise, IBM i is just hanging on, yet still much more alive than most competing legacy midrange platforms (e.g. HP MPE which has been officially desupported by the vendor, although you can still get third party support for it.)