Re: disallow big-endian on aarch64 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Nathan Bossart
Subject Re: disallow big-endian on aarch64
Date
Msg-id aN7vRDeXLULIhv3l@nathan
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: disallow big-endian on aarch64  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Oct 02, 2025 at 05:08:42PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> writes:
>> The benefit is that we can safely assume little-endian in AAarch64-specific
>> code, and on the off-chance that someone tries to build Postgres in an
>> AArch64/big-endian environment, we aren't pretending to support it.
> 
> Is that actually a meaningful benefit, ie can we remove any code
> anywhere?

I'm not aware of existing code that is broken, but some of the stuff I'm
intending to commit soon to optimize hex_{encode,decode} might be sensitive
to endianness.  In any case, I don't think it's outside the realm of
possibilities for architecture-specific code.

> Given that we don't believe any OS support exists for this
> combination, I'm not sure why we should expend configure cycles
> on rejecting it.  If anyone ever builds such a platform and tries
> to run Postgres on it, either it will work or they'll have to start
> writing patches.  But that applies to a whole lot of not-actively-
> tested configurations.  I don't see why we should go out of our
> way to reject this one.

Okay.

-- 
nathan



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