Has Big-Endian support been deprecated yet?

[Kim Walisch]

Hi,

We all know that the big-endian CPU architecture is slowly dying,

some people even state that "Big-Endian is effectively dead".

So my question is: Does sagemath still support big-endian CPU

architectures like e.g. 32-bit Sparc?

I am asking because there is a ticket

(https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/24966) to integrate my primecount

library into sagemath and primecount currently only supports

little-endian CPUs. I could support big-endian CPUs but I want to

make sure this is required by sagemath.

Thanks,

Kim

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 9:41:50 PM UTC, Kim Walisch wrote:

Hi,

We all know that the big-endian CPU architecture is slowly dying,

some people even state that "Big-Endian is effectively dead".

So my question is: Does sagemath still support big-endian CPU

architectures like e.g. 32-bit Sparc?

We have recently more or less revived a SPARC Solaris 11 port of Sagemath.

So yes, please, make it both-endian...

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2018-03-13 20:33, Kim Walisch wrote:
> primecount currently only supports little-endian CPUs.

That sounds very fishy to me. What are you doing in your code that it
supports only little-endian?

If your code only works for a particular endianness, it probably means
that you are nasty stuff which is going to break anyway on some
architectures or with some compilers.

[Vincent Delecroix]

Dear Kim,

As mentioned on the ticket, this big-endian incompatibility does not
prevent the inclusion of primecount as an "experimental package" that I
still aim to achieve (the type of the package "experimental", "optional"
or "standard" is simply a flag). In practice "experimental" means "not
officially supported" and "less tested".

And as Dima mentioned, it would be simpler for SageMath to have
primecount supporting big-endian. We certainly do not want that a single
library prevents using SageMath on big-endian architecture.

Now, three questions for Sage developers:

- Who is testing a big-endian architecture?

- Are all optional packages big-endian compatible?

- Is it reasonable to ask for big-endian compatibility for
optional packages?

Vincent

PS: to discuss these kind of issues related to development, it is better
to use the other google group sage-devel.

On 13/03/2018 23:11, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
>
>
> On Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 9:41:50 PM UTC, Kim Walisch wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We all know that the big-endian CPU architecture is slowly dying,
>> some people even state that "Big-Endian is effectively dead".
>>
>> So my question is: Does sagemath still support big-endian CPU
>> architectures like e.g. 32-bit Sparc?
>>
>
> We have recently more or less revived a SPARC Solaris 11 port of Sagemath.
> So yes, please, make it both-endian...
>
>
>
>
>>
>> I am asking because there is a ticket
>> (https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/24966

>> <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftrac.sagemath.org%2Fticket%2F24966&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHvco5SWFB7CiS50MxgtC2P8g3mxA>)

[kcrisman]

I tested for quite some time on PPC old Mac OS but finally had to give it up when I had to compile a gcc to compile the gcc that compiled Sage :-)