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POCan I safely assume that Windows installations will always be little-endian?
 

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  1. POCan I safely assume that Windows installations will always be little-endian?
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    <p>I'm writing a userspace filesystem driver on Windows and endianness conversions are something I've been dealing with, as this particular filesystem always stores values in little-endian format and the driver is expected to convert them (if necessary) for the CPU it's running on. However, I find myself wondering if I even need to worry about endianness conversions, since as far as I can tell, desktop Windows only supports little-endian architectures (IA32, x86-84, etc.), and therefore, the on-disk little-endian values are perfectly fine sans conversion. Is this observation accurate, and if so, is it generally acceptable to make the assumption that Windows will always be running on little-endian hardware? Additionally, is it even possible (in 2011) to run Windows on a big-endian emulator or something, such that one could even <em>test</em> for endianness issues?</p> <p><strong>Edit:</strong> For additional clarity, the way my code currently works, I do an endianness check at startup time, and then every time I load a value off the disk, I run it through an inline function that uses an intrinsic to change endianness if the architecture is big-endian. The problem is, I don't know if I might have missed one or more of those places where I needed to do a conversion and the easiest way to see if I screwed up is to run the program on a big-endian architecture. So I'm interested in knowing <strong>(a)</strong> if it's even necessary to do these checks since Windows doesn't ordinarily run on little-endian platforms (today anyway), and <strong>(b)</strong> how I could possibly test my code, seeing as I can't think of a way to run Windows on a big-endian architecture, and manually reversing <strong>all</strong> the multibyte values on disk still involves a manual process that I might well screw up.</p>
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    1. COendianness checks are (or should be) done at compile time, never runtime. The endianness of an architecture is intrinsic to the machine code generated - its a waste to check at runtime, something that was fixed at compile time.
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    2. CO@Chris Becke, Good idea. I switched over to using `<boost/detail/endian.hpp>`, which has a preprocessor definition-based way of determining the byte order. This let me use conditional compilation to make the conversion functions one-liners rather than checking the endianness each time (which should make the functions entirely disappear when optimized on little-endian platforms, I believe).
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