[ros-dev] Endianness

[Alex Ionescu]

Bart Grantham wrote:

> Sorry to barge onto the list with what may be an offtopic post, but I 
> am very curious about how married ReactOS is to little-endianness.  Is 
> there something intrinsic about how Windows is architected that would 
> prevent ReactOS from being ported to a big-endian platform?

No, Windows itself originally ran on multiple platforms and is very 
portable. The problem is with the actual apps out there. A lot of them 
are married to litle-endianness... so already, if you had a ROS PPC 
port, then you could only run NT PPC programs. And if the port was 
big-endian, then you could only run the NT PPC programs which are 
portable enough to work in big-endian.

> I noticed that the inital work on the PPC port was done with the CPU 
> in little-endian mode.  Was this for convenience or was this a 
> technical decision?

Mostly convinence for the reasons above.

>
> Definitely not an important topic but if someone could satisfy my 
> curiousity, I'd be grateful.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bart

Best regards,
Alex Ionescu