endianness

The Web is now little-endian thanks to ArrayBufferViews exposing endianness and everyone testing only the little-endian case.

If you can specify bit endianness, byte endianness, spans of bytes, and so on...

Even though the bytecode is being executed on a VM, the VM itself has been ported to the architecture, which has a native endianness.

Any sensible code is going to have to do that stuff whether the machine's endianness matches IP's or not, though.

Then, it's possible to make mistakes when converting between representations, eg getting endianness wrong.

Also, wouldn't little-endianness generally benefit 16 bit arithmetic operations performed on 8 bit ALUs?

We use DataView wherever we can, but it's quite likely we do have endianness bugs in our code.

Seems reasonably safe to assume that i32 and f32 have the same endianness.

This is just a guess, but I think the odex pass on dalvik switches the endianness to the architecture's native.

ARM still lets you switch endianness, but nobody other than me ever seems to (and they claim they will probably deprecate that going forward).

The order is probably as contentious as the great endianness debate, but I think one of the most awkward parts of having src, dst order is that subtraction looks backwards.

We could have changed the endianness with a single makefile change.

Never send anything "on the wire" (or to a file) unless you know its exact size and endianness.

The unfortunate thing is that "network byte order" is big-endian so it's still the traditional endianness to use for wire protocols or on-disk formats.

Endianness might be a bit older than editorness.