[whatwg] fxCanvas 0.2 and some remarks about canvas spec

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's evil.  Isn't JavaScript meant to conceal machine details like
> endianness?  Couldn't we mandate that the conversion here must be
> little-endian?  Granted that it'd be slower on ARM and such, but
> "slower" is way better than "causes the program to break".  If the
> performance is really needed, provide extra methods that convert in
> big-endian fashion.  Then those writing programs targeted at ARM, or
> those who are willing to write different algorithms for big- and
> little-endian, can use those instead.
>
> Or has this already become such a big and general problem that fixing
> it is basically hopeless, and we're just resigned to everyone's
> scripts breaking on ARM because they were only tested on x86?

(Actually, it seems like ARM can be either little-endian or
big-endian.  Apparently it can vary based on the device, and in some
cases can even be switched on the fly.  So if everyone just hardwires
their ARM smartphones to little-endian, specifying that the function
is little-endian should be even more harmless.  Googling suggests that
at least the iPhone is little-endian.)