Re: [Caml-list] Core has landed

["Markus Mottl" <markus.mottl@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 4:19 AM, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
>  It would be nice to have bin-prot working on all architectures ...

The biggest obstacle to this is that the current implementation
assumes little endian machines.  Both 64bit and 32bit are fully
supported on these platforms.  It would certainly be possible to
support other architectures, but good portability and performance are
not easily combined here.  If performance does not matter, it would be
easiest to just convert all data to the protocol already used by
little endian machines.  This would noticably slow down communication
with/among machines that are not little endians.  Since the vast
majority of computers are little endians, this won't matter for most
people.  OCaml takes a similar approach.

Note that communication _among_ machines with different endianness,
assuming that they all have the same byte layout, should work, too,
with the current binary protocol.  At least if you do not mix 32/64bit
machines there...

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl http://www.ocaml.info markus.mottl@gmail.com