On Thursday, May 8, 2014 5:25:49 AM UTC-4, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> Making the Web little-endian may indeed have been the right thing.
> Still, at least from the outside, it looks like the WebGL group didn't
> make an intentional wise decision to make the Web little-endian but
> instead made a naive decision that coupled with the general Web
> developer behavior and the dominance of little-endian hardware
> resulted in the Web becoming little-endian.
>
> http://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/latest/#2.1 still
> says "The typed array view types operate with the endianness of the
> host computer. " instead of saying "The typed array view types operate
> in the little-endian byte order. Don't build big endian systems
> anymore."
>
> *Maybe* that's cunning politics to get a deliberate
> little-endianization pass without more objection, but from the spec
> and a glance at the list archives it sure looks like the WebGL group
> thought that it's reasonable to let Web developers deal with the API
> behavior differing on big-endian and little-endian computers, which
> isn't at all a reasonable expectation given everything we know about
> Web developers.
This is a digression, and I'm happy to discuss the endianness of typed
arrays/webgl in a separate thread, but this decision was made because it made
the most sense, both from a technical perspective (even for big endian
machines!) and from an implementation perspective.
You seem to have a really low opinion of Web developers. That's unfortunate,
but it's your opinion. It's not one that I share. The Web is a complex
platform. It lets you do simple things simply, and it makes complex/difficult
things possible. You need to have some development skill to do the
complex/difficult things. I'd rather have that than make those things
impossible.
- Vlad
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