Re: [Caml-list] Core has landed

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

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 2:42 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@upsilon.cc> wrote:
>  Sounds like a reasonable solution indeed. Way better than not having
>  bin-prot on some archs (this is particularly annoying in Debian, where
>  we support several big endian machines; the status quo would mean no
>  Core on them and in turn no application using Core on them. Currently we
>  patched Core on that architecture to remove the bin-prot dependency, but
>  is a rather hackish solution I would like to get rid off).
>
>  Do you plan to implement such a solution in forthcoming releases?

We currently do not have any immediate need and man power to fully
support big-endian machines (we also don't have access to any), but
we'll gladly accept patches.  This could be implemented using
platform-specific macros as is the case with 32/64bit.

This is what works / doesn't work as of now:

  *) Big-endian and little-endian machines cannot communicate with
each other for anything but very specific cases.  Don't use the binary
protocol in such heterogeneous environments.

  *) 32 and 64 bit, little-endian architectures can communicate
freely, assuming, of course, that integers do not overflow on 32bit.
This is tested at runtime to prevent hard to debug errors.

  *) 32bit big-endian machines can communicate with each other freely.
 64 bit big-endians can communicate with each other freely, too, but
not necessarily with 32bit big-endians: values of type int64, etc.,
may not necessarily be communicated correctly.  Note, too, that you
should exclusively use the automatically generated converters on
big-endian machines.  The hand-written (slower) ones for the basic
types are intended mostly for testing purposes only, and will not work
when mixed with a different endianness (they assume little-endians).

Thus, it certainly makes sense to package the binary protocol for
big-endians, too, as long as people are informed of what works.  Since
almost nobody uses big-endian machines, most users won't care.  But
I'd surely be happy to see a patch to fully support all
architectures...

Regards,
Markus

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