Re: Big-endian Gcc on Intel IA32

[Alan Lehotsky <apl@alum.mit.edu>]

At 1:04 PM -0800 12/17/01, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>In article <20011217200410.D28DAF28BE@nile.gnat.com> you write:
>><<My question to you all is:  Is there a big-endian GCC available on IA32?
>>                                       If available, who is the source of
>>contact and what is the effort involved here?
> >>>
>......
>One thing that might be helpful for portability issues like this, where
>the user _is_ willing and able to recompile the application, but maybe
>not able to find all subtly users of byte-order dependencies would be to
>allow the notion of "byte order attributes" on data structures.
>
>This can be especially useful for those architectures that actually have
>at least limited support for either byte-order (ie I think sparc64 has a
>"load as little-endian").


	It ought to be possible to add a peephole to the MD file that matches the inline expansion of
	htonl() or ntohl() and results in the appropriate load-endian instruction....

	I don't think that any data-structure tagging would be necessary (although I admit that there
	might be some utility to making things work without the programmer needing to carefully
	wrap all the accesses and assignments with appropriate XtoY's)

-- Al
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