[whatwg] API for encoding/decoding ArrayBuffers into text

[Charles Pritchard]

On 3/16/2012 4:25 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 3/16/12 5:25 PM, Brandon Jones wrote:
>> Everyone knows that typed arrays /can/ be Big Endian, but I'm not aware
>> of any devices available right now that support WebGL that are.
>
> I believe that recent Firefox on a SPARC processor would fit that 
> description.  Of course the number of web developers that have a 
> SPARC-based machine is 0 to a very good approximation....


I've written some hash/encryption methods that could very well could 
fail on Firefox on SPARC; many things fail on machines I've never tested 
with.

Flip the implementation on SPARC, and it wouldn't harm anything. Cut it 
out of the spec, so that the behavior is undocumented, implementations 
break.
DataView is a more complex than ArrayBufferView, so implementers started 
with the easy option.

The coders using Float32Array are cowboys; (web app gaming and 
encryption). We're talking about a few hundred people out of many millions.