I’ve seen a lot of messages about some big-endian “issues” (ok, no worky) with the bitcoin client. Before I sit and try to analyze all the source code, are there any known “bad bits” of the code that assume LE?

I have some idle G4 and Sparc machines that can happily be put to use…plus an old decrepit Alpha that needs to be tested to see if it still boots…

The code assumes little-endian throughout and was written with the intention of never being ported to big-endian.  Every integer that is sent over the network would have to be byte swapped, in addition to many dozens of other places in code.  It would not be worth the extra sourcecode bloat.

Big-endian is on its way out anyway.

57,483 total views, 6 views today

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=816.msg11610#msg11610