Mark Dickinson <dicki...@gmail.com> added the comment: Thanks, Mark.
A few comments: - The patch seems incomplete. There are other places in the source tree that care about endianness. I haven't done a thorough search, but the native endianness support in the struct module comes to mind. There are also some more obscure places---for example, there's at least one piece of code (in Python/compile.c) that tries to distinguish between the doubles 0.0 and -0.0 by looking only at the first and last bytes of the double, and that doesn't work for this particular mixed-endian format. I guess the patch could go in as it is, but adding only partial support for mixed-endian doubles seems dangerous. - I know very little about ARM, so please correct me if I'm talking rubbish here. But if I understand correctly, this mixed-endian format is only an issue for the old ABI, and isn't relevant for the newer "Embedded" ABIs. So the need for this is likely to diminish over the next few years. Is that correct? - Adding support for mixed-endian doubles probably has to be considered a new feature, so could not go in until 2.7, which is probably still a good few months away (I'm guessing a year or more, but there's no roadmap at the moment). How prevalent is the old ABI? How widespread do you think it's likely to be in, say, 3 or 5 years' time? Is there going to be a real need to be able to run Python 2.7 and Python 3.1 on mixed-endian platforms? I'm -1 on adding mixed-endian support, especially if all that's gained is an ability to deal with infinities, nans and signed zeros. It would mean adding a significant amount of code that's going to be awkward to maintain and test, and that seems likely to become redundant within a few years. I'd upgrade that -1 to a -0 in the presence: of (1) an OABI ARM buildbot, (2) a developer who's available to do testing on ARM, and (3) a more complete patch. _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue1762561> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
